Health and Social Care Research
Many researchers in the School of Social Sciences carry out research in the broad areas of health, wellbeing and care. We are interested in the social relations of health and care, health policy and health and care inequalities at both local and global scales.
Birkbeck has secured a grant of nearly £900,000 from the Wellcome Trust to build a diverse health research workforce who will collaborate on nurturing and sustaining an inclusive, ethical and creative research environment that supports the research and mental health/well-being of colleagues across their academic careers from postgraduate researcher to professor.
Our activities will provide tailored support for First Gen, Black, people of colour and other groups recognised as being disadvantaged in higher education, to further their research and careers in health and health-related subjects.
We will implement a suite of pilot projects which aim to test the hypothesis that we can support the development of a diverse, inclusive, ethical and creative research culture across the institution through:
- developing a diverse academic workforce from the bottom up
- improving recruitment and retention of a diverse academic workforce from early career researcher to professor
- the co-production of knowledge in health research with people with lived experience.
Within each of these strands we have identified several activities as targets for innovation including investing nearly £500,000 to support PhDs and postdoctoral researchers from historically excluded communities to work on health research (broadly defined), and seed-funding for projects to develop proof of concept research and collaborate on co-production of knowledge research applications with people who have lived experience of health and wellbeing inequalities.
