Sarah Hennelly

Dr. Sarah Hennelly is a Senior Lecturer in Public Health at Oxford Brookes University, working within the School of Psychology, Social Work and Public Health. She teaches across multiple Public Health master's programs including the MPH, PGDip, and PGCert in both Public Health and Global Public Health Leadership. Her teaching responsibilities include Foundations in Public Health, Public Health Policy, Communicable Diseases, Community Empowerment and Advocacy, and Advanced Health Promotion.

Dr. Hennelly's research focuses on improving population health through prevention and intervention strategies. Her primary areas of interest include health behaviors and developing theory-based behavior change interventions, mindfulness-based approaches, Conscious Dance practices, community wellbeing initiatives, military Reservists and their families, mental health, and the impact of parental mental health during pregnancy and childhood on children's outcomes. She is particularly interested in how these interventions can be effectively implemented in real-world settings.

Her publication record demonstrates a consistent focus on practical public health interventions, with recent work examining military family welfare support systems, AI-enhanced wellbeing applications for students, bystander intervention in harassment situations, conscious dance benefits, and mindfulness-based maternal behavior change. Her research often employs mixed-methods approaches to understand both the effectiveness and implementation challenges of public health interventions.

• Innovate UK Smart Grants/Northern Ireland Department for the Economy: £212,323 for University wellbeing Artificial Intelligence (awarded August 2021)
• Oxford Brookes University PhD funding
• Chartered member of the British Psychological Society (BPS)
• Fellow of Advance HE (formerly HEA)
• Member of BPS Division of Health Psychology (DHP)
• Member of UK Society for Behavioural Medicine (UKSBM)

Dr. Hennelly has served as a research consultant to the Mindfulness in Schools Project and the Institute for Statecraft's Shared Outcomes project. Her current research includes developing a wellbeing chatbox for undergraduate students and examining the wellbeing impact of community activity groups, particularly conscious dance and other holistic movement practices. She is actively involved in multiple research networks including the Centre for Psychological Research, Children and Young People's Research Network, Healthy Aging the Arts, Media, and Creative Industries Research Network, and Applied Social Psychology Group at Oxford Brookes, as well as external networks like the Conscious Dance Research Network and Oxford Social Prescribing Network.

Her research group involvement spans both internal university networks and external professional organizations, demonstrating her commitment to collaborative research across disciplinary boundaries to address complex public health challenges.