Medical Humanities Investigator Award holders

The current award holders include:

Senior Investigators

New Investigators

Dr Jessica Reinisch (Birkbeck, University of London)

Senior Investigators

Professor Mary Dixon-Woods (University of Leicester)

Mary Dixon-Woods is Professor of Medical Sociology at the Department of Health Sciences, University of Leicester, where she leads the Social Science Applied to Healthcare Improvement Research Group. Educated at Dublin City University, Trinity College Dublin and Oxford University, she leads a large programme of research focused on patient safety and healthcare improvement, healthcare ethics, and methodological innovation in studying healthcare.

Professor Dixon-Woods is widely published and cited. She is an associate editor of 'BMJ Quality and Safety', associate editor of 'BMC Medical Research Methodology', co-editor of 'Chronic Illness' and a member of the editorial boards for three further journals. She won the University of Leicester's Frank May prize in 2005 in recognition of research excellence.

Queen Mary, University of London, awarded her a Distinguished Visiting Fellowship in 2007 to pursue research on public trust in medical research. She held a fellowship under the ESRC's Public Services Programme (2008- 2009) to study regulation of doctors.

She has been a member of the Health Foundation's Improvement Science Development Group since 2010. Mary was elected as an Academician of the Academy of Social Science in 2011. She was appointed Adjunct Professor in the Department of Anaesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine at Johns Hopkins University in 2012.

This project examines the ethical issues involved in delivering and researching patient safety and quality in healthcare. Her goal, using a robust programme of empirical research and normative analysis, is to advance the field by identifying and characterising the moral dilemma in seeking to provide safe, good-quality care and to generate moral rules and principles to help guide resolution of those challenges.

Her work will produce a critical, empirically informed account of accountability systems, including the ethical issues raised by using administrative and clinical data as a means of staff surveillance and discipline. It will also inform the optimal design and selection of strategies for securing patient safety and quality while being sensitive to the trade-offs and tensions between different values, goals and interests.

Professor Susan Golombok (University of Cambridge)

Susan Golombok is Professor of Family Research and Director of the Centre for Family Research at the University of Cambridge, and a Professorial Fellow at Newnham College, Cambridge. Her research examines the impact of new family forms on parent- child relationships and children's social, emotional and identity development.

She is particularly interested in family forms that have arisen in the late 20th century following the growth of the women's and gay liberation movements and the introduction of assisted reproductive technologies. Professor Golombok has pioneered research on lesbian mother families, gay father families, single mothers by choice and families created by assisted reproductive technologies including IVF, donor insemination, egg donation and surrogacy.

Her research has not only challenged commonly held assumptions about these families but also contested widely held theories of child development by demonstrating that structural aspects of the family - such as the number, gender, sexual orientation and genetic relatedness of parents - are less important for children's psychological wellbeing than the quality of family relationships. In addition to academic papers, she is the author of 'Parenting: What really counts?' and co-author of 'Bottling it Up, Gender Development and Growing up in a Lesbian Family'.

This project will obtain much-needed empirical data on the impact of advances in assisted reproduction to address the ethical issues as they inform the development of policy and practice. The overarching question to be addressed is, "What are the social and psychological outcomes of emerging assisted reproductive technologies for individuals, families and society?"

Given that 4.5 million children worldwide have been born through assisted reproduction, Golombok's research promises to make a significant contribution internationally to public debate, clinical practice and regulation in this controversial yet expanding area of public health.

Professor Rosamund Scott (King's College, London) and Professor Stephen Wilkinson (Keele University)

Rosamund Scott, whose background is in philosophy and law, is Professor of Medical Law and Ethics at the Centre of Medical Law and Ethics in the School of Law, King's College London. Her research has centred on ethical and legal issues in reproduction. Her first book, 'Rights, Duties and the Body: Law and ethics of the maternal-fetal conflict', was published in 2002. In 2007, she published 'Choosing between Possible Lives: Law and ethics of prenatal and preimplantation genetic diagnosis'.

Her roles in policy advice and engagement include membership of the MRC Steering Committee for the UK Stem Cell Bank, the Nuffield Council of Bioethics 2012 Working Party on 'Donor Conception: Ethical Aspects of Information Disclosure' and, previously, the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists' Ethics Committee. She is a member of various journal editorial boards ('Clinical Ethics', the 'Journal of Medical Ethics'), an Executive Committee Member of the Society for Applied Philosophy, a Trustee of the Institute of Medical Ethics and a barrister. She has also served on Wellcome Trust funding panels.

Stephen Wilkinson is Professor of Bioethics at Keele University and Head of the Research Centre for Law, Ethics and Society. His most recent research is on reproductive ethics and the regulation of reproductive technologies, especially the ethics of selective reproduction (practices that involve choosing between different possible future people).

Professor Wilkinson's publications include 'Choosing Tomorrow's Children' (Oxford University Press) and 'Bodies for Sale: Ethics and exploitation in the human body trade' (Routledge). He has served on grant-awarding panels for the AHRC and the Wellcome Trust, is a member of several editorial boards (including those for 'Bioethics', 'Clinical Ethics' and the 'Journal of Medical Ethics') and was a member of the Ethical Advisory Sub-Group of the Organ Donation Task Force.

This joint research project will examine the ethical issues surrounding the transfer of reproductive materials, both to facilitate reproduction and to underpin biomedical research. In addition to developing a coherent and philosophically defensible ethical framework with which to think about the donation and transfer of human reproductive materials, this research will examine the implications of that framework for clinical practice, law, public policy, and regulation.

Dr Ian Harper (University of Edinburgh)

Ian Harper is a Medical Anthropologist based in the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh, where he is involved in establishing and running the Anthropology of Health and Illness Programme. He originally trained in medicine and worked in Nepal for more than three years, where he gained programmatic experience in tuberculosis control work. He followed this with two years working with NGOs throughout India in supporting community health programmes.

Dr Harper's PhD in Social Anthropology focused on the social relations around, and the effects of, a series of primary health programmes in Nepal, including the tuberculosis programme. He has combined academic research with applied work and in 2008 worked in the Nepal National Tuberculosis Programme, assisting with the implementation of programmes funded by the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

Dr Harper's research will explore the implementation of the WHO STOP TB Strategy. Countries have been broadening the arenas of TB control activities to include: TB/HIV, drug-resistant forms and issues of marginalised populations; health system strengthening; empowering people and communities; and developing operational research. Four aspects of this will be researched:

• In what ways has the Global Fund stimulated civil society and the private sector involvement?
• How has this changed the approach to TB control?
• What public health and ethical issues are revealed in the production and implementation of guidelines for drug-resistant tuberculosis, and how are these resolved?
• Drug-resistant forms of tuberculosis raise complex issues for diagnosis. What are the implications of introducing new technologies, both for tuberculosis outcomes and for broader laboratory and health systems performance?

Dr Sanjoy Bhattacharya (University of York)

Dr Bhattacharya was educated in St Stephen's College (Delhi), Jawaharlal Nehru University (New Delhi) and the School of Oriental and African Studies (London). After postdoctoral stints in Sheffield Hallam University and the University of Oxford and a Lectureship and Readership at University College London, Sanjoy is now based at the University of York, where he is the founding Director of the Centre for Global Health Histories (an interdisciplinary body situated within the Department of History).

Dr Bhattacharya's work is driven by a belief in the value of interdisciplinary and detailed research, and the capacity of historical assessments to contribute in positive ways to the design and implementation of health policies. He is deeply involved - on an independent basis - with the World Health Organization's Global Health Histories project, which is now an official, audited activity within the WHO offices.

Sanjoy co-organizes the WHO's flagship Global Health Histories Seminars with the WHO Department of Knowledge Management and Sharing and has established collaborations with academics based all over the world. He is editor of the journal 'Medical History' and co-editor of the 'New Perspectives in South Asian History' monograph series.

Dr Bhattacharya's programme of research will provide a rounded and original analysis of one of the most ambitious efforts at increasing health coverage and equity internationally: the global movement for Primary Health Care (PHC). Developed and run over the course of much of the 1970s and 1980s, this health programme is deserving of detailed attention in a context where a new global movement for PHC is being advocated yet again by the World Health Organization (WHO).

This is, therefore, an ideal time for the preparation of detailed, historically grounded, interdisciplinary and independent studies of past and current chapters of PHC. Situating these studies in detailed national and local case studies is important, so they can assist in the development of more context-specific and effective global health policy.

This project will acknowledge the great institutional complexity of the WHO and other UN organizations such as UNICEF, as well as national and local governments. It will examine the provision of universal healthcare within India, Ceylon/Sri Lanka and Bangladesh and look at the impact of the transnational spread of ideas as a result of work carried out by global health agencies in South Asia.

Professor Volker Scheid (University of Westminster)

Volker Scheid is Professor of East Asian Medicines and Director of the EASTmedicine (East Asian Sciences and Traditions in Medicine) Research Centre at the School of Life Sciences, University of Westminster.

His research explores the diversity of East Asian medical practices from an interdisciplinary perspective drawing on medical history, anthropology and science studies. This focuses on developing new frameworks for understanding East Asian medicines that go beyond the discourse of modernity; exploring the emergent interface between East Asian medicines and contemporary technoscience; and making this knowledge relevant to the medical humanities more generally, as well as to clinical researchers and others interested in the ongoing development of these practices.

Professor Scheid's publications include 'Chinese Medicine in Contemporary China: Plurality and synthesis', 'Currents of Tradition in Chinese Medicine, 1626-2006' and 'Integrating East Asian Medicine into Contemporary Healthcare' (ed. with H MacPherson). He is President of the International Association for the Study of Traditional Asian Medicines and a visiting professor at the Zhejiang University of Chinese Medicine and Pharmacology in Hangzhou, China.

Professor Scheid's project examines the ways that East Asian medicines emphasise age-old practices yet are capable of forging synergistic links to some of the most innovative areas of modern technoscience. East Asian medicines continue to be widely described as 'traditions', a label that automatically casts these practices in opposition to the modernity of biomedicine and science, yet these boundaries are consistently being blurred.

Professor Scheid's research will examine East Asian medicines through the past thousand years in - and on - their own terms. Analysing how physicians in various locales seek to solve concrete clinical problems by engaging with bodies, researching pharmaceuticals, assembling them into recipes and debating how to achieve consistent clinical effects, he will build a picture of East Asian medicine as a landscape made up of distinct styles of practice to produce a new understanding of its role in medical practice today.

Professor Jonathan Barry (University of Exeter)

Professor Barry studied History at Cambridge before undertaking a doctorate under the supervision of Professor Keith Thomas. He is now Professor of Early Modern History and co-Director of the Centre for Medical History at the University of Exeter.

Barry has been active in the Society for the Social History of Medicine, the Pre-Modern Towns Group and regional history. He has edited or authored ten books and 43 articles, including studies of urban history, the 'middling sort' and provincial culture in early modern England, especially Bristol and the south-west. His monograph 'Witchcraft and Demonology in South-west England, 1640-1789' was published by Palgrave in December 2011.

Dr Barry's project is a ground-breaking survey of all medical practitioners active in England, Wales and Ireland c.1500-1715, which will be used to produce the first broad study of the nature and impact of medical practice in early modern Britain.

Analysing all available data on early modern British medical practitioners, Barry will explore their education, career patterns and medical activities, as well as their major contributions to science, the arts, business, and religious and political thought. This will reveal the key contribution of medical practitioners to the revolutionary changes in Britain's place in the world.

New Investigators

Dr Jessica Reinisch (Birkbeck, University of London)

Jessica Reinisch grew up in Berlin. After gaining a degree in Human Sciences at the University of Oxford, she went on to study for an MSc in the History and Philosophy of Science, Medicine and Technology at Imperial College London.

Her PhD, completed in 2005, looked at public health in Germany in the aftermath of the Second World War - occupied by Great Britain, the Soviet Union, the United States and France - and compared the different occupation zones and regimes. Subsequently Dr Reinisch was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship for Eric Hobsbawm's Balzan Project at Birkbeck College, by a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship. Since 2009 she has been Lecturer in European History at Birkbeck. Her recent publications include

'The Perils of Peace', 'The Disentanglement of Populations', 'Postwar Reconstruction in Europe' and 'Justice, Politics and Memory in Europe after the Second World War'.

Dr Reinisch's work appraises the history of internationalism and international organisations in twentieth-century Europe. New international structures and mechanisms often came into existence as a result of tough-minded decisions by military generals and politicians. Concerns about public health crises (real or imagined) and humanitarian disasters were catalysts which spurred or forced policy-makers at local and national levels into humanitarian action, often reluctantly, and created a system of international procedures and organisations which continue until today.

Examining the origins of such policies, consequences and lasting legacies, Reinisch's project will construct a new, broad perspective on ideas and forms of nationalism. It will put centre-stage the short-lived United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration as the most significant international organisation to be established from the ruins of the League of Nations, which significantly shaped international collaboration in its wake.