Governance and delivery of prison health are my primary research interests. My recent monograph, The English Prison Health System After a Decade of Austerity (2023), was shortlisted for the Social Policy Association’s Richard Titmuss Award, the British Academy’s Peter Townsend Award, and the British Society of Criminology’s book award for advancing the fields of social policy and criminology.

My research has informed the work of the World Health Organization, the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture, the UN Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture, the House of Commons Justice Committee, the National Audit Office, the Howard League for Penal Reform, and Prison Reform International. My work has also been featured in major media outlets such as Byline Times, The Guardian, the Daily Mirror, and Al Jazeera.

I am currently a principal investigator for a British Academy–funded project that is evaluating the degree to which Southeast Asia prisons are prepared in the event of future pandemics. As both a principal investigator and a co-investigator on projects such as this one and numerous others, I have generated over £500,000 in external funding.

I currently serve as a visiting professor at both Monash University, in Malaysia, and Chulalongkorn University, in Thailand. I am a co-editor for the journal Justice, Power, and Resistance (published by Bristol University Press) and an academic editor for PLOS ONE, a peer-reviewed, open-access health journal.

Additionally, I am a joint team leader for the Social Harm Policy Group of the Social Policy Association. With twelve members from six institutions—Bristol, Durham, York, Birmingham, Oxford, and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation—the Group advances knowledge of social harm in relation to contemporary societal issues and fosters crosscutting research activities that impact academia and beyond.

Prior to working in academia, I was a Public Health Commissioner for various public-sector organisations in Southwest England. Such life experiences demonstrated to me that prison health is part of public health, especially given that nine out of ten prisoners will eventually return to the community.

For media enquiries, speaking invitations, and research collaborations, I can be reached at: Nasrul.Ismail@bristol.ac.uk. I welcome the opportunity to supervise doctoral students on topics aligned with my research interests.