Sam is a Research Associate in Population Mental Health, Health Inequalities, and Quantitative Methods at King’s College London, where she works within the UKRI Population Health Improvement (PHI-UK) Population Mental Health Consortium.

Her research examines how social, institutional, and structural injustices shape population mental health across the life course. Using quantitative and longitudinal methods, she investigates how inequality and discrimination shape health, with the aim of informing fairer policies and practices.

Sam joined King’s in 2017 as a researcher on the Resilience, Ethnicity, and AdolesCent Mental Health (REACH) study, a large school-based cohort study examining adolescent mental health in inner-city London. She later completed a PhD in Social Epidemiology at King’s, funded by the ESRC London Interdisciplinary Social Science Doctoral Training Partnership. Her doctoral research used data from REACH and partnership working with young people to examine ethnic and racialised inequalities in police stop and search and school exclusion, and the impact of these structural harms on adolescent mental health. Sam also holds an MSc in Global Mental Health from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and a BA in Criminology from the University of Manchester.

Alongside her research, Sam contributes to teaching and mentoring across epidemiology, quantitative methods, statistics, and population mental health. She is committed to community-partnered and equity-focused research, working closely with local communities and organisations to ensure research is relevant, meaningful, and socially useful. She is also co-developing an Equality Impact Assessment tool designed to help research teams embed equity at every stage of their work, identify potential barriers to inclusion, and strengthen meaningful collaboration with people, communities, and organisations affected by the work.

Research Interests

• Social epidemiology
• Health equity and social justice
• Discrimination, racism, and intersectionality
• Policing and criminal justice
• Quantitative and longitudinal methods

Sam welcomes enquiries from students interested in quantitative, epidemiological, or evidence synthesis projects relating to health inequalities, discrimination, social and structural determinants of health, or social justice.

Research Groups

• Health Inequalities Research Group
• Society and Mental Health Research Group

Teaching

• Statistics for Mental Health Research I
• Statistics for Mental Health Research II (Module Co-Lead)

Sam contributes to teaching across postgraduate and undergraduate programmes in epidemiology, quantitative methods, social and community mental health, and applied social statistics. She also supports student supervision, mentoring, and community-engaged learning initiatives.

Expertise and Public Engagement

Sam works closely with community organisations and young people to ensure research is grounded in lived and living experience and has relevance beyond academia.

She has collaborated with Black Thrive on research and policy projects examining the mental health impacts of policing on young Black communities and was a co-recipient of the Wellcome Data Prize in Mental Health (2022-23) for the Black Thrive-led project, The Impact of Stop and Search on Young Black People’s Mental Health.

Her research has been presented to policymakers, practitioners, representatives from the Metropolitan Police, education leads, health and social care leads, and community organisations, including the Lambeth Youth Justice Partnership Board. She also contributed to Black Voices on Policing – a consultation with Black Londoners on policy accountability, transparency, and community scrutiny, commissioned by the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime.

Sam is a member of the Early Career Race and Ethnicity Network at the Centre on the Dynamics of Ethnicity (CoDE), University of Manchester.