Who We Are
Meet the Team
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Director
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Prof. Cecilia Vindrola is an anthropologist interested in applied health research and the development of rapid approaches to research. She is the Director of the Rapid Research Evaluation and Appraisal Lab (RREAL). She is currently PI for two MRC-UKRI funded studies on the development of rapid research approaches (STREAM and LISTEN). She is a theme lead for the NIHR Central London Patient Safety Research Collaboration, focusing on safer healthcare organisations.
She also leads three national qualitative process evaluations funded by NIHR (AIR SAFETY, POPSUP and E-PERISCOPE). Prof Vindrola is responsible for the delivery of qualitative studies within trials (SWATs) for the VITAL, ACCESS, WAFER, MULTI-MIBI and LAP-PIE trials (all funded by NIHR). Prof Vindrola also leads on an average of ten consultancies per year, working with organisations such as the World Health Organisation (WHO), Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST), Wales Centre for Public Policy (WCPP), NHS England and Improvement (NHSE/I), Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF), International Committee for the Red Cross, Genomics England and CAPE. She has written extensively on the use of rapid qualitative research and works as a Professorial Research Fellow in the Department of Targeted Intervention, UCL.
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PPIE Lead and
Research Fellow -
Katie has completed a BSc in Psychology and Youth Studies at Teesside University and an MSc in Health Psychology at UCL. Katie’s research interests are driven from having had major surgery herself and include service evaluation of perioperative pathways, patient experiences of undergoing surgery and patient and public involvement in research.
Katie will begin a PhD, at UCL, in 2025 looking at perioperative interventions to improve surgical outcomes for patients from low-income backgrounds.
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Research Assitant
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Gráinne has a BSc in Psychology from Northumbria University and has recently completed an MSc in Clinical Mental Health Sciences at UCL.
Her interests include health inequalities, inequities and access to care for both physical and mental health conditions. She has previously volunteered for a North East charity to improve social outcomes in older adults and held an Honorary Research Assistant role with the NIHR Mental Health Policy Research Unit throughout her MSc.
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Research Fellow
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Emma is an experienced qualitative health researcher whose work has focused on children and other vulnerable groups. She spent 11 years at the Louis Dundas Centre for children’s Palliative Care at UCL conducting a number of projects including a Cochrane review on the pharmacological interventions for pain in children and adolescents with life-limiting conditions, an interview study exploring advanced care planning in children with life-limiting conditions, and a part-time PhD exploring quality of life in children with high-risk brain tumours.
She joined the Rapid Research Evaluation and Appraisal Lab (RREAL) in May of 2023 and has worked on the NAP 7 project exploring a Big Qualitative and sentiment analysis of free-text responses to survey data focused on anaesthetist's experience of perioperative cardiac arrest. She will apply the learning from this to a Big Qualitative analysis of patient safety data within the PSRC project.
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PhD Student
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Rita is a PhD student at RREAL, she has a Bachelor's degree in sociology from the University of Leeds, and a Master's degree in Global Health from King's College London. Her core competencies include communication, problem-solving, and leadership.
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Research Fellow
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Syka holds the position of Assistant Professor in Psychology at the University of Bradford and is a research fellow at the Rapid Research and Appraisal lab at UCL. Before joining the University of Bradford, her career included roles as a lecturer at Birkbeck University and Manchester Metropolitan University. She is a passionate advocate for mental health equality. Her academic interests encompass a wide range of areas, including cultural adaptations of psychological interventions, health inequalities, mental health prevention and public and patient engagement in research. As a qualitative researcher, she has developed expertise in rapid qualitative research methods and collaborates with leading experts at UCL in developing and refining this innovative methodology.
Dr Iqbal iscurrently funded for impactful research projects including the NIHR Mental Health Leaders Award which is focussed on Integrated Strategies for Preventing Inequalities and Reducing Early life risk factors for Mental Health challenges (INSPIRE), NIHR project on Public acceptance of the use of administrative datasets for public Health Research, MRC project on Digital Animation in Service Improvement (DAISI) project and Examining Cultural Adaptations for Family Interventions with People experiencing Psychosis.
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Research Associate
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Sigrún has been working as a researcher for RREAL since 2021, after she gained an MSc in Population Health at UCL.
Over this time, she has gained experience in practicing predominantly qualitative research skills, across many health and social related areas including: the response and recovery to COVID-19; the rapid evaluation and appraisal of health services; the evaluation of clinical trials; mapping of pathways to diagnosis; and research into domestic abuse, and violence against women and girls.
Based on her experience of applying rapid approaches to research and evaluation, Sigrún has been working with RREAL to develop resources and approaches to contribute to the rapid field of evaluation and research. This has included developing Standards for Rapid Evaluation and Appraisal Methods (STREAM) and refining the method for the Collaborative and Digital Analysis of Big Qual Data in Time Sensitive Contexts (LISTEN).
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Research Assistant
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Noémie is an anthropologist interested in experimental care, the use of emerging technologies in health care, and patient/health care providers relationships. She previously received a MSc in Social Anthropology from the University of Oxford, and an MSc in linguistics from the Sorbonne-Nouvelle University. She spent several years teaching in France, Switzerland, Australia, and Hong Kong.
She is a research assistant on the John Fell-funded project “Vaccine Hesitancy and online misinformation consumption and distribution among frontline healthcare workers”.