Nicola Hawley, PhD

Dr. Nicola Hawley is an Associate Professor of Epidemiology (Chronic Disease) at the Yale School of Public Health and holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Anthropology at Yale University. She also serves as Associate Director for Dissemination and Implementation Science at the Yale Center for Clinical Investigation. Trained as a human biologist, Dr. Hawley is an internationally recognized expert in maternal and child health, with particular expertise in the developmental origins of obesity and related chronic diseases.

Her interdisciplinary research bridges epidemiology, anthropology, and global health to examine how early life exposures—during pregnancy, infancy, and childhood—shape long-term health. She employs a life-course perspective and mixed-methods approaches across cross-sectional, cohort, and randomized controlled trial designs to identify critical windows for intervention. A hallmark of her work is the integration of community-engaged and culturally responsive strategies to address maternal and child health disparities in under-resourced and Indigenous settings.

While her primary research focus is on Pacific Islander communities in Samoa, American Samoa, and the US, Dr. Hawley has built long-standing collaborations in South Africa, Uganda, New Zealand, and the United States, contributing to global evidence on perinatal health, childhood growth, and intergenerational disease risk. For the past 15 years, Dr. Hawley has used methods in Dissemination and Implementation (D&I) Science to study the etiology, measurement, and prevention of obesity-related chronic diseases across the lifespan. A global health researcher by training, she is a mixed-methods expert and advocate for community-engaged approaches to research interventions and development of health policy. Since joining the faculty at Yale ten years ago, Dr. Hawley has mentored >50 Master of Public Health Students and numerous PhD students, postdoctoral fellows, and early career faculty.

Her current research portfolio includes NIH- and PCORI-funded studies addressing gestational and Type 2 diabetes, prevention of excess gestational weight gain, childhood obesity, and cardiometabolic risk across generations. She is also leading efforts to develop culturally grounded interventions that span pregnancy through adolescence, aiming to disrupt the intergenerational transmission of chronic disease. As a mentor, Dr. Hawley plays a central role in training the next generation of US and global health scientists, serving as primary mentor on multiple NIH career development awards (K01, K99, F30, F31) focused on Pacific Islander health.