Meet our new UCL Health of the Public Creative Health Community Co-Leads
13 December 2022
UCL Health of the Public's Creative Health Community has appointed two new co-leads, Dr Humera Iqbal and Dr Rochelle Burgess, and a new creative health Early Career Network lead, Dr Karen Mak.
Rochelle, Humera and Karen will develop an exciting programme of events to bring together researchers from across UCL whose work focuses on health creation and understanding creative approaches to reducing health disparities. The new leads will carry on the fantastic work of Prof Helen Chatterjee and Dr Lorna Collins, who launched the community in November 2021.
Dr Rochelle Burgess is Associate Professor in Global Health and Deputy Director of the UCL Centre for Global Non-Communicable Diseases, at the Institute for Global Health. Rochelle is interested in the promotion of community approaches to health globally, and views communities as a route to understanding and responding to the political economy of poor health. For the past decade, she has focused largely on mental wellbeing and the experience of common mental disorders, and is a leading voice in the emerging field of social interventions in Global Mental Health. She has led a range of projects that focus on the development of community mental health interventions (in South Africa, Colombia, UK and Zimbabwe) and has contributed her methodological and mental health expertise to projects on community led responses to other health challenges, such as child health in Nigeria.
Dr Humera Iqbal is Associate Professor of Social and Cultural Psychology based at the Thomas Coram Research Unit, part of the UCL Social Research Institute. Humera studies young people and families particularly from migrant and minority groups, social representations, citizenship, including statelessness and identity. Another strand of her research interrogates the influence of culture, nature and the arts on wellbeing and belonging. Humera uses mixed methods, arts and film-based methods in her research, which is based internationally (particularly South Asia), as well as here in the UK.
Dr Karen Mak is a Research Fellow in Quantitative Social Science at the Institute of Epidemiology & Health. Karen’s research explores how arts and cultural engagement is associated with improvements in mental health and wellbeing and identifies the profile of engagers across the UK using theories from sociology, behavioural science, and geography. Her work involves partnerships with cross-functional stakeholders including Arts Council England, Historic England, What Works Centre for Wellbeing, and the Social Prescribing Network. Karen was a co-Investigator on an ESRC-grant on communities and wellbeing (WELLCOMM), and is currently part of the research team at the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Arts & Health.