Disability Research at King's

Dr Ellen Adams (Classics and Liberal Arts)

Dr Ellen Adams is a Reader in Classical Archaeology and Liberal Arts. One aspect of Dr Adams’s research investigates how classics may engage with disability studies, with a focus on the experience of Deaf and blind or partially sighted people in museums. This includes events curated in museums that explore the impact of audio description and British Sign Language (BSL) tours, supported by the Wellcome Trust and King’s London Challenge Fund. In 2018, Dr Adams established the Museum Access Network for Sensory Impairments (London).

Dr Adams collaborated with Historic Environment Scotland on Language and Landscape in Holyrood Park which seeks to showcase British Sign Language through four stories and ‘language notes’ interviews with a BSL linguist.

Read Dr Ellen Adam’s research portal profile.

Dr Virginia Carter Leno (Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience)

Dr Virginia Carter Leno is a Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellow at King’s Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience. Her research focuses on applying developmental models to understand the cognitive profile associated with autism, and the mechanisms that contribute to mental health outcomes in autistic youth. She uses a variety of neurocognitive methods combined with longitudinal data to test developmental hypotheses. Although these tools are useful in testing quantitative hypothesis, they are limited in their ability to convey the vast variability of experience in neurodivergent people.

Read Dr Virginia Carter Leno’s research portal profile.

Dr Deborah Chinn (Nursing, Midwifery & Palliative Care)

Dr Deborah Chinn works part-time in a teaching and research role and part-time as an NHS Clinical Psychologist in a community team, for people with intellectual disabilities. In her research, Deborah's key interests are access to health information and health services, health and social care determinants, and inequalities. Her research has looked specifically at access to health information and health and social care for people with intellectual disabilities.

Since January 2021, Deborah has been the research lead on the Feeling at Home project that is funded by the National Institute of Health Research’s School for Social Care Research. This project looks at an important aspect of the quality of residential support for people with intellectual disabilities, including how much people 'feel at home' where they live and what services do to support this.

The project team includes researchers from the University of Southampton and the Sussex Partnership NHS Trust and a researcher with intellectual disabilities. Photovoice (a participatory arts-based research method) has been used to work with groups of people with intellectual disabilities living in group homes in London and Brighton. Findings from the research will be used to create resources that will help residential support providers help the people they work with feel more at home where they live.

Read Dr Deborah Chinn’s research portal profile.

Dr Irene Di Giulio (Faculty of Life Sciences & Medicine)

Dr Irene Di Giulio is a Lecturer in Anatomy and Biomechanics and leads the biomechanics laboratory. Irene’s research focuses on human biomechanics and motor control. She tries to understand how the brain controls movement to develop innovative tools and technologies to support individuals with neuromuscular disorders.

In 2012, Irene collaborated with the SarcoLab project and helped collect data on astronauts before and after six months at the International Space Station. This project sparked her interest in better understanding how we can make space more accessible and inclusive, leading to her work in this area with colleagues at King’s and the German Aerospace Centre. In 2022, they were successful in obtaining funding from the European Space Agency to support their work on the Parastronaut feasibility project.

Read Dr Irene Di Giulio’s research portal profile.

Dr Carla Finesilver (School of Education, Communication & Society)

Dr Carla Finesilver is a Senior Lecturer in Mathematics Education and Inclusion, with a particular focus on the intersection of these two fields – inclusive mathematics education. Her aim is, through research and teaching, to make education more accessible and relevant for all, but particularly for disadvantaged young people and adults.

A main research focus has been the creative and diverse representational strategies and arithmetical reasoning of those students who have struggled with school mathematics taught in ‘standard’ or ‘traditional’ ways. Her current research projects focus on:

• Visuospatial representation in problem-solving using qualitative microanalysis of learners' nonstandard arithmetical-representational strategies.
• Improving inclusive education for marginalised learners with diverse educational needs including disabled, neurodiverse and socioeconomically disadvantaged students.
• Teacher training on inclusive pedagogy for supporting students with Special Educational Needs and, or Disability in the mainstream mathematics classroom.

Read Dr Carla Finesilver’s research portal profile.

Professor Francesca Happé (Social Genetic & Developmental Psychiatry Centre)

Professor Francesca Happé’s primary research focus is autism. Some of her most recent work focuses on mental health on the autism spectrum and under-researched subgroups including women and the elderly. Her research methods have spanned cognitive experiments, functional neuroimaging, exploration of acquired brain lesions, and behaviour genetic approaches. She is a past-President of the International Society for Autism Research and was awarded a CBE in 2020 for services to the study of autism. You can learn more about her work by listening to her interview for The Life Scientific on BBC Radio 4.

Read Professor Francesca Happé’s research portal profile.

Professor Christopher McKevitt (Population Health Sciences)

Professor Christopher McKevitt is Professor of Social Sciences and Health in the School of Life Course and Population Sciences. His research interests include anthropology of health and illness; qualitative methods; ethnographic methods in applied research; health services research; complex intervention development and evaluation; experiences of stroke and other chronic disease; and user involvement.

Read Professor Christopher McKevitt’s research portal profile.

Dr Gráinne McLoughlin (Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience)

Dr Gráinne McLoughlin is a Senior Lecturer at King’s Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience. She is a Cognitive Neuroscientist studying brain function in neurodevelopmental and psychiatric conditions, often in the context of genetic, familial and environmental influences. Her work has focused on the study of electroencephalographic measures of brain signals in attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism, eating disorders and depression.

Gráinne is passionate about improving diversity and inclusion in her research and has innovated ways of achieving this, including the introduction of data collection outside the laboratory via the use of mobile, or portable, electroencephalography (EEG). Shortly after her appointment to King’s, Gráinne was awarded an MRC New Investigator Grant, which has funded the largest mobile EEG study of ADHD and autism in the world to date. A key outcome of this study was the increased research participation that mobile EEG allowed, as the majority of participants with autism and ADHD requested to participate from home. This provided proof-of-concept that mobile EEG testing can improve accessibility and participation in research for potentially underrepresented groups.

Read Dr Gráinne McLoughlin’s research portal profile.

Dr. Miranda Melcher (War Studies)

Dr Miranda Melcher is a teacher, researcher, author, and a fellow of the HEA. She recently completed her PhD on post-conflict military reconstruction at King’s Defence Studies Department. Her pedagogic research and teaching practice focuses primarily on working one to one with neurodiverse students and developing and delivering teacher training workshops on inclusive and accessible teaching practices.

Based on her years of teaching online and in person, Miranda wrote Teaching to Include Everyone: A Practical Guide for Online Teaching of Neurodiverse and Disabled Students. She provides three overarching principles and practical how-to tips that include examples and explanations for teachers of all kinds. The principles and practices of the guide have been developed into a highly successful workshop, delivered at UK and international universities.

Miranda additionally created a resource to help employees and employers successfully implement neurodiverse workplace accommodations.

Miranda also recently co-authored an article with King’s PhD student, Emily Brown: The upside of disrupted teaching for neurodiverse and disabled students: 10 ways to disrupt pedagogical practices that disregard the importance of accessibility.

Dr Oliver Runswick (Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience)

Dr Oliver Runswick is a Lecturer in Performance Psychology based at the Department of Psychology. Ollie delivers teaching to both our BSc Psychology and BSc Sport and Exercise Medical Sciences programmes. He is a Chartered Psychologist and Accredited Sport and Exercise Scientist, and his research interests span across these domains.

Ollie conducts applied research that fits into the four main themes of: motor learning and skill development; perceptual-cognitive skill; vision and performance; and exercise and cognition. Working on the visual underpinnings of human performance has led Ollie to become involved with Paralympic sport and specifically sport for athletes with vision impairment. Ollie currently works with the International Paralympic Committee and International Blind Sports Federation to develop evidence for the classification of athletes in football.

Read Dr Oliver Runswick’s research portal profile.

Dr Sasha Scambler (Faculty of Dentistry, Oral and Craniofacial Sciences)

Dr Sasha Scambler is a Sociologist working in the field of health and healthcare. Her research focuses on the experiences of people living with long term conditions and disability, inequality, and the application of social theory to empirical research. She is an editor of the Journal Sociology of Health and Illness and a contributing editor of the British Sociological Association affiliated cost of living blog.

Sasha is in the process of analysing interviews that look at the experiences of people who have been treated for head and neck cancer, focusing on the wider social impacts of treatment and rehabilitation.

You can read Dr Scambler's new co-authored papers on using the International Classification of Functioning to look at Oral Health and on Dementia.

Read Dr Sasha Scambler’s research portal profile.

Thanks to Michael Murphy (Research Information and Intelligence Specialist, Research Strategy and Development at King’s) for helping identify disability research going on at King’s. If you also work on disability research please email diversity@kcl.ac.uk as we would be interested to hear from you.