Dr Whitehead is a HCPC-registered Clinical Scientist in Neurophysiology. She qualified clinically in 2010. While working in the NHS, she conducted research into seizure disorders. She then moved to the Department of Neuroscience, Physiology and Pharmacology (NPP) at University College London (UCL), and completed a PhD in neonatal brain development. Between 2019-2023 she was a Principal Investigator at UCL, and co-affiliated to the Institute for Women’s Health alongside NPP, to apply insights from fetal medicine to her newborn neurology research. From late 2023, Dr Whitehead has been a Senior Lecturer at King’s College London, in the Research Division of Digital Health and Applied Technology Assessment (DHATA). She has a special interest in neuromonitoring technologies applied to neonatal/developmental populations, critical care and sleep medicine, and epileptology. Her research is highly cross-disciplinary, inspired by ideas from pre-clinical models and fundamental biosciences, and maths and computer science.

Dr Whitehead welcomes interest from prospective PhD/post-graduate students in areas centred on or interfacing with her research topics, and is experienced in supervising quantitative work. She holds large fetal and developmental datasets, providing opportunities for innovative post-graduate projects.

Please see her kclpure profile for the most up-to-date information about her research.

Research interests

• Neuromonitoring technologies applied to neonatal/developmental populations
• Critical care and sleep medicine
• Epileptology
• Quantitative
• Physiology
• Paediatrics
• Fetal
• Neurology

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Teaching

Dr Whitehead leads MSc Clinical Research Delivery module ‘Research Practice Experience 1’.

She teaches across various other modules, including MRes Clinical Research module ‘Quantitative Research Methods’ and BSc module ‘Genomics in Healthcare’.

She offers MRes/MSc project supervision for three of the college’s health faculties (her own Faculty of Nursing, Midwifery and Palliative Care; Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience (IoPPN); Faculty of Life Sciences and Medicine (FoLSM).

At undergraduate level, she offers research elective placements for BSc Nursing students, and project supervision across multiple other programmes, e.g. BSc Neuroscience (IoPPN), Scholarly Project Module in Year 3 of Medicine MBBS (FoLSM). She also supervises summer research interns within the King’s Undergraduate Research Fellowships and Wellcome Biomedical Vacation Scholarships schemes.