Brenda is a research fellow based at the department of Global Health and Social Medicine, King's College London. Her research interests include understanding the impact of health and socio-economic inequalities on people from minoritised ethnic groups and how these play out in later life. Other areas of interest include the evaluation of health interventions, the use of an intersectional life-course approach to understand diversity and findings ways to bridge the gap between research and social policy or practice. Methodologically, she has training and experience in conducting quantitative, qualitative, mixed methods research, and systematic reviews. She has recently completed an ESCR funded doctorate to assess the effectiveness and suitability of social isolation and loneliness interventions for older people from minoritised ethnic groups living in the UK.
Mai is at the Health Foundation, an independent charity committed to bringing about better health and health care for people in the UK. Mai is currently in the Data Analytics team, involved in a programme of work on inequalities in health and health care.
After studying maths as a first degree, she trained in medical statistics and then completed a PhD in social epidemiology at UCL. She combines her passion for analysing data with a conviction that social factors are key determinants of health and care. Her current projects focus on care for people with multiple conditions, including socioeconomic and ethnic inequalities in care, and the intersection of mental and physical health conditions.
A list of Mai's published work can be found on Google Scholar.
Laia is the study's Principal Investigator. She is a Professor of Social Science and Health at the department of Global Health & Social Medicine, King's College London. Laia’s research interests centre around understanding the determinants of inequities in health, with a focus on life course effects. She is particularly interested in understanding the pathways by which systems of oppression like racism, sexism, and homophobia lead to social and health inequalities. This work has mostly focused on examining the association between racism and health, in order to understand how experiences of racial discrimination accumulate through the life course to pattern people’s health and social outcomes as they age. A Social Epidemiologist by training, Laia takes an interdisciplinary, mixed-methods approach to her work. She has been funded by an ESRC/MRC Postdoctoral Fellowship, an ESRC Future Research Leaders grant, and a Hallsworth Research Fellowship. Most recently she has received funding by the Nuffield Foundation to examine ethnic inequalities in later life.