Dr Gemma Clarke

Profile

I am a Marie Curie Senior Research Fellow based within the Academic Unit of Palliative Care (AUPC) and at the Marie Curie Hospice Bradford. My current post is funded by Marie Curie and encompasses both my own programme of research exploring ethnicity and palliative care; and promoting research within Marie Curie’s services. This involves facilitating research locally within the hospice, and developing research projects locally, nationally and internationally with a range of clinical and academic partners.

I am a social scientist with interests in palliative care, ethnicity and gender, pain management and long-term cancer survivorship.  After completing my PhD in Law (Criminology) examining informed consent, intoxication and decision-making capacity, I worked as a Research Associate within the Palliative and End of Life Care Group at the University of Cambridge. In this role I led projects exploring decision-making for those with neurological disease at risk of lacking decision-making capacity, and decisions concerning stopping oral anticancer drugs towards the end of life.  Before joining the AUPC, I worked as a Research Fellow on the PROMs (Patient Reported Outcome Measures) workstream of the Comprehensive Patient Records Study based between the Patient Centred Outcomes Research group and the Leeds Institute of Data Analytics (LIDA) at the University of Leeds. In this role, I co-designed and implemented a matched controls survey of the long-term effects for cancer survivors.

Research interests

My research focuses on palliative care, ethnicity and pain management. My current projects include: a systematic literature review on ethnicity and pain within palliative care;  an examination of ethnicity and missing ethnicity data in national palliative care databases; and a qualitative interview study concerning pain experiences and management within the British South Asian populations of Leeds and Bradford UK.

Qualifications

• PhD Law (Criminology), Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge
• MPhil Criminological Research, Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge
• MSc Social Research Methods with Gender Studies, London School of Economics
• BA (Hons) Sociology with Gender Studies, University of Warwick

Research groups and institutes

• Leeds Institute of Health Sciences
• St Gemma's Academic Unit of Palliative Care
• Division of Primary Care, Palliative Care and Public Health