Dr Kalpa Kharicha

Kalpa has over 25 years’ experience as a social science researcher, mostly gained at the Centre for Ageing Population Studies, Research Department of Primary Care & Population Health, UCL, and recently applied in the third sector to inform evidence-based change.

Her main research interests include ageing and care across the trajectory of later life and in under-researched groups, wider determinants of health, well-being and inequalities, and loneliness and isolation across the life course and in different contexts. Her PhD was on older people’s experiences and responses to loneliness in later life.

She is primarily a qualitative researcher with broad experience of research methods for applied health and social care research, including reviews and syntheses, mixed methods evaluations, intervention development, randomised controlled trials with clinical trials units, and PPIE using principles of co-design.

Most recently, she was Head of Research, Policy and Practice at the Campaign to End Loneliness, part of the What Works Centre for Wellbeing. She led the Campaign’s research and evidence activities by developing, sharing and using robust evidence to inform decision-making in policy and practice, and partnering with cross-sector stakeholders including researchers, government policy makers, VCSE organisations, businesses and people with lived experience. She worked closely with implementation and communications colleagues to develop wide-reaching and accessible outputs.

She was a course lead on the postgraduate Qualitative Research Methods in Health course at UCL, and co-developed an e-learning course on Tackling Loneliness and Social Isolation for health and social care practitioners at the Campaign.

She worked at UCL from 1997–2018, where she did her PhD, and at the Institute of Psychiatry and Brunel University before then.

At the NIHR Policy Research Unit in Health and Social Care Workforce, Kalpa leads the Visa Study.

Kalpa Kharicha: ORCID iD