Group members
The Health and Wellbeing Faculty Research Group brings together the University of Bristol’s thriving communities and centres of researchers focusing on health and wellbeing.
Group leads
Dr Lucy Series, School for Policy Studies
Research interests: mental capacity, adult social care and disability rights law.
Prof Nick Townsend, School for Policy Studies
Research interests: the development and implementation of population level approaches to prevent and control non-communicable diseases.
Group members
Dr Angela Attwood, School of Psychological Science
Research interests: health behaviour and health outcomes; tobacco and alcohol; anxiety; autism; sleep; general mental health.
Dr Victoria Bates, School of Humanities
Research interests: social history of medicine, medical humanities, and sensory studies.
Prof Yoav Ben-Schlomo, Bristol Medical School (PHS)
Research interests: life course epidemiology; understanding inequalities in chronic diseases, ageing, equitable access to health care.
Dr Roberta Bernardi, University of Bristol Business School
Research interests: digital transformation in healthcare; digital innovation and healthcare professional practice; patient empowerment and the use of social media and online health communities; the production/consumption of health information online, the impact of social media on medical expertise/knowledge and innovation.
Prof Ailsa Cameron, School for Policy Studies
Research interests: health and social care services for adults: integration of services; models of provision; workforce; new ways of work.
Dr Jacks Bennett, Bristol Medical School (PHS)
Research interests: student mental health and wellbeing in HE; social and environmental factors linked to academic outcomes; 'whole university' support interventions.
Prof Havi Carel, School of Arts
Research interests: philosophy of medicine, especially the experience of illness, epistemic injustice in healthcare, and phenomenology of illness.
Prof Chris Chapman, University of Bristol Business School
Research interests: accounting in healthcare.
Dr Fay Clark, School of Psychological Science
Research interests: the link between cognition and affect in nonhuman animals; the parallels between human and animal mental health; the effect of environmental challenges on animals feelings and behaviour.
Prof Joanna Coast, Bristol Medical School (PHS)
Research interests: resource allocation in health service provision; capability wellbeing; priority setting and end of life care; qualitative methods in health economics.
Prof John Coggon, University of Bristol Law School
Research interests: Public Health Ethics and Law, Mental Capacity Law, Law and Political Theory.
Dr Catherine Dodds, School for Policy Studies
Research interests: the interaction between social inequality and HIV prevention need among groups who are disproportionately impacted; the criminalisation of HIV transmission in the UK and internationally; HIV stigma; the biomedicalisation of chronic health conditions; policy process and policy advocacy in undergraduate medical education in the UK.
Dr Peter Dunne, University of Bristol Law School
Research interests: the intersections of law, gender and sexuality; the rights of LGBTI individuals across a range of legal disciplines, with a particular focus on family law, European law and health law.
Cynthia Fonta (final year doctorate student), School for Policy Studies
Research interests: child poverty studies; social determinant of health and health inequalities in vulnerable groups; adolescent mental health and wellbeing.
Prof John Foot, School of Modern Languages
Research interests: the history of Italian radical psychiatry.
Samantha Ford, University of Bristol Business School
Research interests: Creativity (innovation) and effectiveness of linguistic and cognitive phenomena (e.g. metaphor and metonymy) in social marketing for health, wellbeing, and social issues.
Patrick Gaule, School of Economics
Research interests: economics of Biomedical R&D; building R&D capacity in developing countries; global health R&D priorities.
Katharine Hanss, Bristol Medical School
Research interests: the role of place in health and wellbeing.
Prof Claire Haworth, School of Psychological Science
Research interests: mental health and wellbeing across the life course; genetically informative studies that tell us about the role of nature (genes) and nurture (environments); digital technologies to understand, explore and promote mental health and wellbeing.
Prof Pauline Heslop, School for Policy Studies
Research interests: the health and wellbeing of people with learning (intellectual) disabilities in particular, and disabled people in general; the premature deaths of people with learning disabilities;
self-harm in people with learning disabilities; supporting individualised approaches to people with mental health needs; befriending; psychotropic medication.
Dr Theresia Hofer, School of Arts
Research interests:
social and medical processes, and with (sign) language use, in Tibetan areas of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the wider Himalayan, South and Central Asian region, as well as in Japan; social, medical and linguistic anthropology; how the day-to-day lived experiences of disability intersect with global aspects of disability.
Alvin Hui, School for Policy Studies
Research interests: social inequality in mental health; migration and health; health inequality.
Dr Nasril Ismail, School for Policy Studies
Research interests: the impact of political economy on the governance and delivery of prison health.
Prof Jonathan Ives, Bristol Medical School (PHS)
Research interests: clinical ethics; research ethics; best interests decision making; reproductive ethics; ethics and health technology; empirical bioethics methodology.
Prof Saffron Karlsen, School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies
Research interests: the different ways in which ethnicity has meaning and relevance in people’s lives, both for developing awareness of potential group affiliations and as a driver of health and other inequalities.
Dr Lucy Kelly, School of Education
Research interests: reflective practice as a positive tool for educator wellbeing.
Dr Gernot Klantschnig, School for Policy Studies
Research interests: the history and politics of drugs and drug policy; pharmaceutical markets; and policing in West Africa.
Dr Joanna Large, School for Policy Studies
Research interests: the relationships between consumption, leisure and harm; the hidden and explicit forms of harm that relate to sharing health and fitness stories online; gambling harm.
Dr Matthew Lariviere, School for Policy Studies
Research interests: design, implementation and evaluation of digital health and care services; ageing and care futures; theories of care; wellbeing of older people; ethnography; implementation science.
Dr Stephen Mawdsley, Department of History
Research interests: modern American medicine; history of vaccination, disability, and intoxicants.
Dr Angelika Papdaki, School for Policy Studies
Research interests: dietary patterns; traditional/ sustainable diets; meals provision systems for adults with care and support needs.
Dr Marii Paskov, School for Policy Studies
Research interests: economic inequality, wellbeing, social class, economic stress, quantitative research methods.
Dr Anna Pease, Bristol Medical School (PHS)
Research interests: preventing sudden and unexpected death in infancy and childhood; health inequalities; behavioural change; parenting especially in families impacted by poverty; coproduction; intervention design; implementation and evaluation; realist evaluation and innovative trial design.
Dr Oliver Quick, University of Bristol Law School
Research interests: the relationship between law, regulation, policy and patient safety; the emerging area of 'healthcare safety crime.'
Prof Sally Sheldon, University of Bristol Law School
Research interests: health care law and ethics and the legal regulation of gender, with a particular focus on abortion law.
Prof Corinne Squire, School for Policy Studies
Research interests: HIV and citizenships; people with HIV's narratives of living with HIV in conditions of precarity and constraint. Other intersecting research interests are in narrative theory and methods, racialised wealth divides, and refugee education and politics.
Dr Sheena Vachani, University of Bristol Business School
Research interests: intersections between structures of inequality, ethics and politics in organisations and society (these include interdisciplinary approaches to understanding discourses of wellbeing and the ecologies of health and wellness, how these are organised and how they affect working life and health).
Eve Wang, PhD student in School for Policy Studies
Research interests: gender-based violence; sexual and reproductive health and rights of female sex workers; mental health and wellbeing improvement for adolescents.
Dr Paul Willis, School for Policy Studies
Research interests: social inclusion in housing with care for older people; meeting the needs of older carers; men, masculinities and social connections in later life; loneliness and ageing; sexuality, gender identity and ageing; inclusive health and social care provision for LGBTQ+ people.
Prof Lucy Yardley, School of Psychological Science
Research interests: understanding and supporting healthy behaviour; co-producing digital health interventions; mixed methods evaluation.