Dr Clair Le Boutillier is an Occupational Therapist and Senior Research Fellow in Qualitative Research. She brings a participatory and collaborative ethos to her work, bridging research and practice and building partnerships across disciplines and organisations. In 2026 she won the King’s Engaged Research Award for participatory approaches to research (national level).

Her current roles and responsibilities include:

•  Joint Deputy Director of the Qualitative Applied Health Research Centre (QUAHRC), facilitating an international peer-to-peer qualitative special interest group and supporting researchers to showcase their work through blogs and podcasts
• Better Health and Care Hub Accelerator Grant Award holder
• Qualitative Lead for King’s Clinical Trials Unit
• Senior methodologist in Qualitative Research with the NIHR Research Support Service (RSS), hosted by King’s College London and partners, providing qualitative methods expertise to clinicians and researchers seeking health research funding
• Co-lead of an NIHR RSS Methodology Impact Fund grant developing guidance on collaborative data analysis
• Developing and delivering methods training and supporting capacity development across the national RSS team.

Clair’s work centres on participatory methods in healthcare research. Her recent THIS Institute funded Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship, the Personalised Care and Support Study, used design thinking, video-reflexive ethnography and co-design to examine the Holistic Needs Assessment for people living with cancer, achieving public, professional, policy and practice impact. Her research sits within psycho-oncology, with a focus on the psychosocial and supportive care needs of people affected by cancer and how care planning can be made more personalised. She is committed to understanding patient experience and improving both healthcare and the methods used to research it.