Dr Jessica Appleton is a registered nurse, senior lecturer and early career researcher. Child and family health and well-being have been part of her clinical practice and research since becoming a registered nurse. Jessica has clinical, teaching and research expertise in the child and family health specialty and paediatric nursing specialty. Jessica has research experience in mixed methods research with training and experience in qualitative and quantitative data collection and analysis. 

Jessica held a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship role with EPOCH-Translate CRE at The University of Sydney and continues as an affiliate with EPOCH-Translate CRE and Honorary Lecturer at The University of Sydney. In this role, Jessica explored how health promotion interventions (which prevent obesity and related chronic diseases) can be implemented into routine early childhood services. Using implementation science frameworks this project will provide an understanding of how interventions achieve adoption and integration in primary health care systems to reach the general and priority populations.

This postdoctoral work built on her PhD work which explored infant formula feeding in the context of rapid weight gain in infancy (a risk factor for later overweight or obesity). Her PhD identified a gap in evidence around knowledge of infant formula feeding particularly the information and advice, or lack thereof, provided by nurses, midwives and other health professionals to parents feeding with infant formula. Her PhD was a mixed methods research design and involved secondary analysis of a longitudinal infant feeding cohort and qualitative interviews with parents about their infant feeding experience. 

Jessica is a coordination committee member for EPOCH-Connect Community of Practice which aims so support research students and EMCRs from diverse disciplines and research institutes to connect and collaborate on activities to improve child health in the early years. https://earlychildhoodobesity.com/about-us/epoch-connection-community-of-practice/

Since her PhD Jessica worked as the Research Manager (2020-2022) at Tresillian Family Care Centres - Australia’s largest early parenting service. She has been and continues to be involved in a number of research projects in the areas of infant health, parenting, parental mental health, child and family health nursing and health service evaluation.