Tracey O'Sullivan is a full professor at the Interdisciplinary School of Health Sciences, which is part of the Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Ottawa. Her research program examines community resilience and strategies to support high-risk populations during pandemics and other types of disasters. Professor O’Sullivan’s work looks at resilience among older adults, with a specific focus on stroke survivors and family caregivers. Her work emphasizes how deficit-oriented discourse in disaster media, (i.e., ageism in media coverage) can undermine inclusive engagement of high-risk populations in social policy development.
Professor O’Sullivan has been a guest panelist at the United Nations International Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR) Platform Meeting for the Americas where she spoke about high-risk populations as agents of change in disaster risk reduction. She is the associate editor of a book published in 2021 on health-related disaster research methods written for the World Health Organization. She is also a member of several international teams studying the psychosocial impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, including one project looking at resilience among older adults. She has published numerous articles on the social gradient of risk during pandemics, psychosocial supports for high-risk populations during disasters, the effects of the pandemic on health care workers, and contingency planning for family caregiving. Her publication, “From SARS To Pandemic Influenza: Framing of High-Risk Populations” (2019), highlights the need for media analyses and discourse analysis of government communications (including planning frameworks) to examine ageism and other forms of discriminating discourse in order to promote more inclusive language that supports asset literacy.