Research Degree Supervisors
Find out more about our Research Degree Supervisors and their research interests below.
There are three main ways to identify an appropriate supervisor to contact:
1. Browse the list of staff below within the Global Business School for Health and click on their name to view their staff profile on UCL's Institutional Research Information System (IRIS)
2. Look directly on UCL's Institutional Research Information System (IRIS) where you can search for relevant academic units and potential supervisors by keyword. Not all academics are listed in IRIS but it is a good place to start.
3. Search our online research repository (UCL Discovery) where all UCL's research papers are published, subject to approvals. If you identify a research paper that particularly interests you it is likely that one of the authors would be a suitable research supervisor.
Supervisors:
Dr Hend Abdelhakim - Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Marketing and Commercialisation
Taste Masking and Taste Assessment of Bitter Drugs for the Design of Age-Appropriate Dosage Forms:
This research area focuses on developing innovative pharmaceutical formulations that mask the bitter taste of medications, especially important for paediatric and geriatric populations. By employing various taste-masking techniques, such as complexing or encapsulation, we aim to create age-appropriate dosage forms that enhance medication compliance and effectiveness while minimizing aversion to bitter drugs.
Advanced Manufacturing Technologies, including Electrospinning, 3D Printing, and Microfluidics, to Optimize Pharmaceutical Function:
In this research field, cutting-edge manufacturing technologies are harnessed to improve pharmaceutical product design and production processes. Techniques like electrospinning, 3D printing, and microfluidics are utilized to create customized drug delivery systems, nanostructures, and intricate formulations. The goal is to enhance drug efficacy, bioavailability, and patient-specific treatment regimens, ushering in a new era of precision medicine.
Improving Collaboration with Low to Middle-Income Countries to Enhance the Research Environment and Ultimately Patient Access and Health Outcomes:
This research area is dedicated to strengthening global partnerships between high-income and low to middle-income countries in the context of pharmaceutical research and healthcare. By fostering collaboration, sharing expertise, and optimizing resource allocation, we aim to bridge gaps in healthcare access and improve patient outcomes in less economically developed regions. The focus is on sustainable solutions that promote equitable access to safe and effective medications and healthcare services.
Dr Rodolfo Catena - Lecturer in Operations Management and Supply Chain Management
Research Interests: Operations Management and Supply Chain Management
I am looking for potential candidates that have an interest on research that uses large amounts of data and software such as ASS, STATA and R.
Professor Nora Colton - Director of UCL GBSH
- Political Economy of Health
- Health Systems Structures and Performance
- Health Policy and Practices
- Leadership and Innovation
Simon Combes - Lecturer in Health Economics
Research Interest: Resources and Money Migration Health
I am a Health Economist and I have worked on different topics. Lately, I worked on health & migration which led me to think about the resources that are available to fund health, healthcare and more generally public services. I have used a wide range of methods in my research from advance econometrics to ethnography.
- Available public data and use for development
- Data analysis methods: Statistics to deep learning
- Image analysis and formats, rules and regulations around their use for commercial purposes
- Cloud compute vs local decision support
- Evolving space of deep learning regulations (international markets)
Dr Paul Expert - Lecturer in Health Informatics and Graduate Tutor (Research)
- AI for Healthcare: development and application of AI methods to analyse hospital electronic health records to design interventions and improve patient outcomes
- Complexity science: complex system approaches for integrated health system analysis
- Topological data analysis: theory and application of graphs and simplicial complex representations of complex systems, e.g. patient clinical space and their evolution, to identify salient structures
- Fundamental neuroscience: emergence and complexity of brain function and cognition
Dr Susanne Gaube - Lecturer in Digital Health Technologies
Susanne's primary research revolves around comprehending and optimising factors that influence human-AI interaction within the healthcare domain. Her research pursuits encompass understanding healthcare providers' and patients' acceptance of AI-enabled health technology, scrutinising the impact of AI-generated advice on clinical decision-making, and devising strategies to improve human-AI interactions in clinical settings. Additionally, Susanne is leveraging insights from Behavioural Science and Human Factors to advance infection prevention and control measures in hospitals.
Key research interests:
- Human-AI interaction in healthcare
- Technology acceptance and integration
- Human Factors in healthcare
- Infection prevention and control
- Social responsibility of pharmaceutical industry and pharmacists during crises
- The role of tribal culture in pharmacy services in tribal nations
- The role of diversity and integration of economic migrants in healthcare through pharmacists
- Access to medicine for disadvantaged communities in underprivileged countries
Dr Jenny Zhenyi Huang - Lecturer in Finance and Accounting and Lead International Partnerships, Asia
- Healthcare Finance
- Corporate Finance
- Applications of technology/AI
- Corporate Governance
- Corporate Social Responsibility/Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG)/Sustainability
- Investment, Mergers and Acquisitions, Institutional Investors
- Financial markets, Emerging markets
- Navigating careers, career continuity, career progression among women healthcare professionals
- Building and measuring resilience of individuals, organisations and communities
- Lifelong learning systems - healthcare professionals and healthcare organisations
- Technology an enabler to bridge gaps in health system
- Gender, power and politics in healthcare
- Leadership in Healthcare
- Innovation and Digital Health
- Hospital or Healthcare Management
Rama’s research broadly includes 2 streams:
Corporate Finance and Financial Econometrics
This area of his research refers to the capital market, risk analytics and market structures at the micro, meso and macro levels examining firm-level constructs and identifying market antecedents. Factors such as Ownership concentration, Managerial friction, Risk and Portfolio analysis, Resource allocation, and M&As are of particular interest.
Digital Finance
This track of research focuses on digital finance examining how technological innovation such as FinTech disrupts conventionally held views about societal well-being and how to contest it, how digitalisation through financial technology has advanced well-being and inclusion for the marginalise and disenfranchised people, how disruptive Innovation through responsible Artificial Intelligence (AI) impacts business model on platform ecosystem.
Research approach
Rama engages with several empirical approaches and econometric strategies for his research, such as GARCH estimation, Time-series Analysis, Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) Neural Network (NN), and sociomateriality analysis.
Waty Lilaontikul - Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Digital Health Technologies
Research Theme: Human-centred artificial intelligence in the modelling of subtype and severity for individualised early detection of disease states and response to treatment.
AI-for-health research has demonstrated human-level performance but has failed to impact routine clinical care. Safe and responsible AI technologies need to be co-created with end-users in a rigorous develop-train-test loop to ensure that the outputs are fit-for-purpose and can integrate seamlessly into clinical workflows and at clinical timescales. Specifically, technology outputs from my lab focus on the development of:
- Human-AI partnership designs to enable human agency, interaction, and oversight.
- Methods for interpretable and causal multimodal inferencing across time.
- Safe-AI technologies to enable efficient institutional uptake and objective metrics to guide regulations and risk management.
- Applications in diagnosis, disease trajectory and treatment outcome predictions, clinical trial design.
Dr Marzena Nieroda - Deputy Director Partnerships and Lecturer in Healthcare Marketing
My research interests evolve around person-centred approaches to developing health services and strengthening health and broader wellbeing systems. I am interested in PhD supervision in the following areas:
- Wellbeing journeys people experience within a health or wellbeing system.
- The role and acceptance of technology and innovation in wellbeing journeys.
- The role of partnerships and collaboration in strengthening people-centred health and wellbeing systems.
While my research is grounded in core marketing concepts such as consumer behaviour, marketing communications, product and services management and broader marketing strategy, I am interested in supervising students looking to apply some of those constructs in a multidisciplinary research project.
Dr Kabir Sheikh - Professor of Global Health Systems and Policy
I am interested in supervising PhDs in interdisciplinary health policy and systems research, with an orientation towards health equity. I predominantly work in low- and middle-income country settings, and am interested in research that is responsive to health system needs and generates insights and solutions for health system challenges. Specific themes include:
- Strengthening Primary Health Care systems in the emerging contexts of rapid urbanisation, commercialisation, and/or ecological change.
- The roles and capacities of institutions of community and public governance, in managing health systems change and advancing multi-sectoral action.
- Characterizing and governing mixed health and care systems in LMICs (public-private, formal-informal, traditional-modern, digital-nondigital).
- Opportunities and risks for health systems from the proliferation of digital interventions and the information revolution
- Strengthening learning health systems in LMICs, including mechanisms for institutionalization of health systems research and research use.
- The health and care workforce and the health professions.
Dr Sonila Tomini - Lecturer in Health Economics
Dr Sonila M. Tomini is a Lecturer in Health Economics at University College London, Global Business School for Health. She holds a PhD in health economics and public policy analysis (Maastricht University, 2011).
Sonila’s principal research areas of expertise related to health economic evaluations, techniques in policy evaluation, and assessment and indicators of poverty and vulnerability. She has published a number of articles in international peer-reviewed journals. In addition, Sonila has provided continuous advice on public health care financing, children wellbeing and inclusion. Her expertise also extends to evaluation studies for emergency and humanitarian interventions. She has provided her expertise to international organisations like the World Bank, UNICEF, DFID, WHO and WFP.
She is a scientific collaborator at UNU-Merit, Maastricht University, at the Department of Economics of the University of Liège (Belgium).
Professor Sotiris Vandoros - Professor of Health Economics
Research areas: Health Economics; pharmaceutical economics and policy; socioeconomic determinants of health; behavioural science
Sotiris studies the impact of economic conditions, shocks and uncertainty on health and health-related behaviours, and on regulation and competition in pharmaceutical markets, studying topics such as the generics paradox and therapeutic substitution.
Dr Paola Zappa - Lecturer in Organisational Behaviour and Human Resource Management
Research interests:
Organisational social networks – Antecedents, dynamics and consequences of workplace collaboration, knowledge sharing/hiding in healthcare; interplay between formal organisational structures and informal social networks
Future of work – Impact of new technologies, AI applications and remote working on organisational processes and outcomes
Atypical workers – career patterns, behaviours and management of people occupying jobs that do not fit the traditional model of permanent, regular-hours employment.
Dr Ruijia Zhan - Lecturer in Finance and Accounting
- Accounting and finance related research
- Financial reporting quality: earnings management, real earnings management, audit quality
- ESG: ESG in capital market, ESG and firm value, ESG assurance
- Corporate governance: board governance, gender diversity