Professor Felicity Thomas

Felicity is Professor of Culture and Health Inequalities in the Department of Health and Community Sciences, and Director of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Culture and Health. Her work focuses on understanding and addressing health and care inequities. She is especially interested in understanding how cultures - encompassing societal values and norms, working practice, and regulatory and research cultures – intersect to impact on health and care delivery, particularly for marginalised population groups. She has a particular interest in the intersections between poverty, adverse childhood experiences, mental health, and medicalisation, and in supporting practice to improve children and young people's mental health and wellbeing. She works in collaboration with policy makers, service users, patients and health and care providers to understand the cultural contexts that shape their experiences, and to design and lead impactful studies that shift working practice to create more ethical and sustainable health and care.

Felicity is an applied social scientist with an interdisciplinary background. She draws mainly on narrative, ethnographic and engaged research methods.