The Team

I am a psycho-oncologist and a health psychologist with expertise in qualitative research methodology. I pursue an interdisciplinary approach building multi-stakeholder working in cancer care and have established global partnerships of academics, patients, non-profit organisations, professional organisations and policy makers. My research strategy focuses on understanding the impact of cancer and treatment on individual’s lives and methods for involving different stakeholder groups, particularly patients, in the design and delivery of care.

Mr Bekheit is a Consultant HPB and Minimally Invasive Surgeon who is experienced in the surgical management of liver cancer with particular interest and skills in the Minimally Invasive approaches.

Mr Bekheit is a passionate Scientist Surgeon who strongly believes that Science is a fundamental asset for clinical improvement. He has collaborative work with distinguished teams in the field of liver cancer and is ambitious that these collaborations will result in a significant impact on healthcare provision. Over the past decade, became an author of many journal articles and an editorial board member for many. Authored book chapters. Received research grants. Awarded several academic degrees.

I am a Research fellow at the Academic Urology Unit at University of Aberdeen. My current research focus is on how health systems and context impact health behaviour change and health outcome. A key focus of my research project is patient and public involvement in health research, policy and care in various contexts. I have expertise in qualitative methods and evidence synthesis. My previous work focused on review of health policies, and effectiveness of health interventions. I have collaborated with universities and institutions across the UK, Europe, USA, Canada, India and Nepal. She is currently working in NIHR-funded ‘CATHETER II Randomized Control Trial’ exploring patients’ experience of living with long-term catheter and various catheter washout policies, and health care professionals’ perception of ‘Catheter II’ trial delivery and outcomes.

Paul Ross is a Consultant Medical Oncologist at Guy’s & St Thomas’ and King’s College Hospitals and Honorary Senior Lecturer at King’s College London. He specialises in the treatment of Gastro-intestinal malignancies focussing on colorectal cancer and hepatic, pancreatic and biliary (HPB) cancers. He is a Medical Information Officer for these institutions focussed on Cancer. He is Clinical Lead for the King’s College Hospital Hepatocellular Cancer Multi-disciplinary meeting. He has served on the NCRI Upper GI Cancers Clinical Studies group and its hepatobiliary sub-group. He has also served on the adjuvant and advanced disease sub-group of the Colorectal Cancer Clinical Studies group. 2019 – 2020 he was a member of NHS England’s Chemotherapy Clinical Reference group. His research interests are focussed around systemic therapies, personalised therapy, pharmacogenomics, interventional oncology and clinical trials. He has been Chief Investigator and Principal Investigator on numerous trials across his areas of interest.

Paul trained in Medical Oncology at the Royal Marsden Hospital and the Institute of Cancer Research where he was a Cancer Research Campaign Clinical Fellow. His Research was acknowledged by the award of the McElwain prize from the Association of Cancer Physicians and a Merit award from the American Society of Clinical Oncology.

Julie Adams is the Outreach Project Coordinator and PPI Lead for the British Liver Trust. She has worked in the third sector for almost 20 years, predominantly for health charities with a national remit. She is passionate about encouraging and supporting patient and carer representatives to become involved in research and has worked on multiple grant-funded projects. She sits as an independent member on the standards committee of her local council, working to promote and maintain high standards of conduct by Councillors and co-opted Members of the Authority, and overseeing the Council’s Whistleblowing regime.

Bhuvan Majmudar (he/him) is the Projects & Partnerships Executive at Egality, a role that has allowed him to weave together his multiple passions and skill areas. At Egality, his work focuses on end-to-end project management, business development, and community building. As a queer person of colour, Bhuvan brings a unique understanding of socio-economic and cultural barriers faced by the global majority.

He graduated from the London School of Economics with an MSc in International Development in 2022. Prior to this, he worked with Deloitte India in their Human Capital Consulting practice for 2 years. Over the years, he has also been involved in various social initiatives such as mentoring students through Project EduAccess, teaching socio-economically disadvantaged children, and writing for the Thrive+ Research Hub.

Shaun is a health services researcher interested in efficient trial design, particularly around inclusive recruitment and retention and the effective presentation of research evidence. He led the development of the NIHR INCLUDE Ethnicity Framework, a tool to help trialists design inclusive trials and PRECIS-2, a tool to match trial design decisions to what the users of the results need. He leads an initiative called Trial Forge (http://www.trialforge.org) that aims to be more systematic about how we identify, generate and use research evidence in making trial design, conduct, analysis and reporting decisions. In 2019 Trial Forge won the international Cochrane-REWARD Prize for outstanding work in reducing waste in research. Finally, Shaun is an Editor-in-Chief of the journal Trials.

Verity leads the Preference and Value research theme. Verity’s research focuses on the provision of public and publicly-provided private goods. In particular, the organisation and supply of health care, and patient’s choices and shared decision making. Verity’s research spans health economics, environmental economics, behavioural and experimental economics, health policy, labour economics, and poverty measurement.

I am currently a Professor of Medical Statistics and the Director of the Centre for Health Care Randomised Trials (CHaRT) which is the Clinical Trials Unit embedded within the Health Services Research Unit. My overarching research interest is in designing fair tests of health care treatments and policies, with a specific interest in evaluating surgical and complex interventions. I’m also interested in improving the design, conduct, analysis and reporting of clinical trials through the development and application of methodological research to clinical trials from CHaRT.

My undergrad degree is in Mathematics from the University of Aberdeen, graduating in 1997. After a year of training as a Mathematics teacher, I joined the Unit in September 1998 as a statistician. I studied part-time for an MSc in Applied Statistics at Sheffield Hallam University, graduating in 2004. In 2008 I was appointed Senior Statistician, and in 2016 was I Interim Programme Director for the Health Care Assessment Programme, until being appointed as CHaRT Director in April 2017.

Mieke Van Hemelrijck leads the Translational Oncology and Urology Research (TOUR) Team in the School of Cancer & Pharmaceutical Sciences at King’s. She became a Reader (Associate Professor) in Cancer Epidemiology in September 2018, and became a Professor in late 2020. She joined the Group in August 2008 from Harvard School of Public Health to study for her PhD on ‘Metabolic Syndrome and Prostate Cancer: Biomarkers and Treatment Side-effects’, which she completed in November 2010. At Harvard, her Master’s thesis focused on bladder cancer and smoking patterns, building on her Master’s in Statistical Data-Analysis received from Ghent University in her home country of Belgium in 2006.

As a cancer epidemiologist working with national registers and hospital-based (biobank) data in the UK and Europe, Prof Van Hemelrijck has expertise in clinical data, statistics, clinical practice and patient care in the area of uro-oncology. Moreover, several of her PhD students and staff are conducting qualitative research into understanding patients’ needs and experiences (e.g. development of an educational support tool for men with prostate cancer on active surveillance; development of an exercise intervention as part of standard care for men with prostate cancer). Furthermore, Prof Van Hemelrijck has worked with Movember on developing a consensus document on semantics in active surveillance for men with prostate cancer using a modified Delphi consensus procedure. Most recently, Prof Van Hemelrijck started working with the European Association of Urology (EAU) Guidelines Office as part of the EU-funded PIONEER Consortium – big data for prostate cancer. She is leading the work package that aims to develop standardised definitions of prostate cancer outcomes among different stakeholders using the Delphi consensus procedure. Prof Van Hemelrijck’s prostate cancer research is internationally recognised and she is currently also involved in another large international Consortim: ReIMAGINE.

Peter Murchie trained in medicine at the University of Aberdeen, graduating in 1994. He completed vocational training in general practice in Northeast Scotland before embarking upon a career in academic general practice through a Cancer Research UK Primary Care Oncology Fellowship. He is currently Professor of Primary Care and lead of the Academic Primary Care Research Group, within the Institute of Applied Health Sciences University of Aberdeen.  He leads a research programme which uses clinical data to pursue two main aims: first to better understand the cancer diagnostic pathway within primary care, and second, to improve community-based cancer survivorship care. He maintains a foothold in daytime and out-of-hours general practice in Northeast Scotland.