Home institution: University of Victoria, Canada
Mentor and host institution: Cecilie Thøgersen-Ntoumani, University of Southern Denmark

Project Outline: Amanda Willms is a doctoral student in Kinesiology at the University of Victoria whose research focuses on co-designing and evaluating mHealth interventions to promote physical activity. The HBIC award will support her visit to the University of Southern Denmark to collaborate with Prof. Cecilie Thøgersen-Ntoumani, a leading expert in physical activity behaviour change and principal investigator of the VILPA WISE project, a digital intervention to promote vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity (VILPA) among physically inactive mid-life women. During this visit, Amanda will examine the behaviour change techniques (BCTs) embedded within the VILPA WISE app and develop a VILPA-specific BCT framework to guide evidence-informed mHealth intervention design.

Home institution: University of Tübingen, Germany
Mentor and host institution: Elizabeth Holmes-Truscott, Deakin University, Australia

Project Outline: Dr Amy McInerney is a postdoctoral researcher at the department of Population-Based Medicine, University of Tübingen, Germany. Her research focuses on psychosocial factors related to health, with a focus on metabolic conditions and mental health, and she uses digital monitoring technologies and advanced statistical approaches to study dynamic health, behavioural, and psychological processes. The HBIC award will support Amy’s collaboration with Dr Elizabeth Holmes-Truscott at the Australian Centre for Behavioural Research in Diabetes (ACBRD), Deakin University, Melbourne. Their collaborative project will examine the network structure of diabetes specific distress and positive wellbeing at the level of individual items, with the goal of identifying mechanistic pathways and precise, diabetes specific targets for intervention.

Home institution: Kids Research Institute, Australia
Mentor and host institution: Marta Marques, NOVA National School of Public Health, Portugal

Project: Dr Anna Boggiss is a Postdoctoral Researcher at The Kids Research Institute Australia, committed to making mental health care a routine and valued part of care for young people with chronic conditions. Mentored locally by A/Prof Amy Finlay‑Jones and internationally by A/Prof Marta Marques, the project will develop a Youth Co‑Design Technique Ontology to bring greater clarity, consistency, and transparency to the language used to describe youth involvement in health research. Together, the team will develop a new global framework to better define and improve youth co‑design, helping ensure young people’s voices meaningfully shape the services, programs, and supports designed for them.

Home institution: Leeds Institute of Health Sciences, University of Leeds, UK
Mentor and host institution: Marleah Dean Kruzel, University of South Florida, USA

Project Outline: Dr. Kelly Lloyd (she/her) is a Senior Research Fellow at the Leeds Institute of Health Sciences, University of Leeds, working within the Division of Primary Care, Palliative Care and Preventive Medicine. She is a behavioural scientist specialising in decision making among patients with hereditary cancer syndromes and their primary care clinicians. Through the HBIC Award, she will undertake a new international collaboration with Dr. Marleah Dean Kruzel, Associate Professor at the University of South Florida, to gain training in health communication and uncertainty management research to support patients with hereditary cancer syndromes. Together, they will develop a theoretically informed study protocol describing a series of co design studies, which will support the development of a future behavioural intervention in this area and a competitive grant application.

Home institution: School of Nursing, The University of Hong Kong, China
Mentor and host institution: Lance McCracken, Uppsala University, Sweden

Project Outline: Lily Chan is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Nursing, The University of Hong Kong, and a registered nurse in Hong Kong. Her research focuses on palliative and psychospiritual care for individuals living with long‑term neurological conditions, with a particular interest in advancing neuropalliative care through evidence‑based behavioral approaches that support holistic well‑being. During her PhD, she developed a community‑based psychospiritual intervention (CALM‑Neuro) for people with progressive neurological diseases that integrates mindfulness and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)-based components into palliative care. A randomized controlled trial demonstrated promising improvements in psychospiritual well‑being. The HBIC Award will support her collaboration with Professor Lance McCracken, Head of the Division of Clinical Psychology at Uppsala University and an internationally recognized expert in ACT and contextual behavioural science, to conduct exploratory analyses of the CALM‑Neuro trial and further refine the intervention protocol based on empirical findings.

Home institution: Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad, India
Mentor and host institution: Claire E. Wakefield, Stanford University, USA

Project Outline: Shraddha Namjoshi is a fifth-year PhD student in Health and Medical Psychology at the Department of Liberal Arts, Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad (IITH), Telangana, India, supervised by Prof. Mahati Chittem. Her doctoral research focuses on parental experiences in pediatric cancer care, particularly unmet and under met needs pertaining to supportive care and assessing the culture-fit of models of care. The HBIC award will facilitate a continued collaboration with Prof. Claire E. Wakefield and a visit to the Department of Pediatrics, Stanford University, School of Medicine. Shraddha will qualitatively explore the experiences and behaviours of clinicians, faculty and family support groups in paediatric palliative care settings in India and the US and examine how collective versus nuclear family structures and gendered caregiving roles shape parental health behaviours and unmet supportive care needs across both cultural contexts and assess the cross-cultural applicability of existing psychosocial supportive care models, in paediatric palliative care settings.