People

Charitini Stavropoulou

Dr Charitini Stavropoulou is Co-director of CHIR and a Reader at City St George’s School of Health and Medical Sciences. She is a health services researcher, with a background in health economics and policy. She has been interested in the role patients play in health and health
care and she has more recently started doing research on the impact that funded health research has on academic, economic and social outcomes and innovation in the UK. Charitini’s work has appeared in leading international journals, including The BMJ, The Lancet Public Health, Milbank Quarterly, Social Science and Medicine and Journal of Health Economics among others. She has received funding from different bodies, including The Health Foundation, NIHR and The Royal Marsden.

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Anirban Mukhopadhyay

Prof Anirban Mukhopadhyay (PhD, Columbia) is Professor of Marketing and Behavioural Science at Bayes Business School. His research examines the interplay between laypeople’s beliefs, emotions, and decisions, with substantive interests in health- and food-related decision making, field experimentation, and subjective wellbeing. Anirban’s research has been published widely in major journals across several disciplines including marketing, psychology, health, and nutrition.

Anirban is a former Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Consumer Psychology, past winner of the Early Career Award of the Society for Consumer Psychology, and has been recognized as a Young Scholar and an MSI Scholar by the Marketing Science Institute. He was previously the Lifestyle International Professor of Business at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, where he served as Associate Provost (Teaching & Learning) among other administrative appointments.

Harry Scarbrough

Prof Harry Scarbrough is an Emeritus Professor in Information Systems and Management at City's Business School. He was the founder and co-director of CHIR until his retirement in 2024. He continues to be involved with the Centre bringing a wealth of experience in research on healthcare innovation and knowledge translation. This includes the role of Principal Investigator on a major NIHR-funded study of the role of social networks in bridging the gap between research and practice in healthcare settings.

He was Director of the ESRC research programme on ‘The Evolution of Business Knowledge’, and has also led ESRC and EPSRC-funded studies of innovation in a range of other sectors, including manufacturing, financial services, and video games. His work has been published in leading international journals,
including Organization Studies, Social Science and Medicine, and Information Systems Research.

Kyriaki Giorgakoudi

Dr Kyriaki Giorgakoudi is an SHPS Senior Research Fellow (substantive post) at City St George’s School of Health and Medical Sciences. She is the leader of CHIR's Economic Evaluation workstream.

Kyriaki is a mathematical modeller and health economist interested in applying quantitative methods in interdisciplinary health research. Her experience includes research in veterinary, human and zoonotic infectious diseases, vaccines, cancer-related innovations, mental health, food policy and science communication. She is currently leading work-packages in several NIHR-funded studies and works closely with the NHS. Kyriaki is the CHIR Impact Lead and a Fellow of Advance HE.

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Anita Mehay

Dr Anita Mehay is a Senior Research Fellow at CHIR. She is a chartered Health Psychologist with an interest in developing, spreading and embedding innovations to tackle health inequalities, particularly those relating to race and ethnicity. She has worked across a variety of health and social care services as well as diverse community contexts including maternity healthcare, children and family services, prisons and offender care. Anita has been successful in securing grants from various agencies including the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR), Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Youth Endowment Fund, UK Department for Work and Pensions, Ministry of Justice, and the Greater London Authority. Her work has appeared in leading journals including The Lancet, BMC Medicine, Journal of Public Health, Health & Place, BMJOpen among others and has featured in the IPPR Progressive Review, Public Sector Focus and HSJ.

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Katie Rose Sanfilippo

Dr Katie Rose Mahon Sanfilippo is a Presidential Research Fellow at SHPS and a member of the Centre for Healthcare Innovation Research. Her overall research interests concern the function and application of music and the arts within healthcare contexts to address health inequalities. Her current research is investigating how community and arts-based approaches and interventions can be scaled up, spread and sustained more equitably in the UK and globally, with a focus on resource-constrained settings. She also works with various policymakers, charities and health organisations to promote maternal mental health in the educational and health policy agendas in The Gambia and across Africa. She is an affiliated lecturer in Cambridge within the music faculty and also has extensive experience working in the charity sector in the UK.

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Dr Brenda Hayanga

Dr Brenda Hayanga is a Presidential Research Fellow at City St George’s School of Health and Medical Sciences. She is primarily interested in research that illuminates the ways in which individual-level processes intersect with social, historical and structural processes to cause inequities for people from minoritised ethnic groups. Other areas of interest include migration experiences, processes that influence the formation maintenance of social networks, social isolation and loneliness, ethnic inequalities in multiple long-term conditions, and the evaluation of interventions.

Methodologically, she has training and experience in conducting quantitative, qualitative, mixed methods research, and systematic reviews. She has expertise in using intersectionality-informed approaches which ensure a holistic understanding of health inequities faced by marginalised populations.

Mengjun Wu

Dr Mengjun Wu is a Research Fellow at City St George’s School of Health and Medical Sciences.

Mengjun is a health economist and quantitative researcher. She has worked across a variety of health-related research topics, including prisoner’s mental and physical well-beings, dental services in prison, hearing, dementia, stroke, child psychology and mental health.

Her research interests lie in health economics, epidemiology and public health, and undertaking health economic evaluations to understand and use of economic evidence in decision making.

Dr Divya Srivastava

Dr Divya Srivastava is a Lecturer in Research Methods in the Department of Global, Public and Population Health and Policy. Divya leads the Research Methods Module at the School of Health and Medical Sciences. Divya is a health economist and current research looks at the intersection between economics, digital health technologies including AI involving methods for analysis and health financing. She is the founder of the Special Interest Group in the Economics of Digital Health Technology under the auspices of the International Health Economics Association.

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Atena Barat

Atena is a research fellow at the Centre for Healthcare Innovation Research (CHIR). Her research focuses on the evaluation of InSites CEP (Clinical Entrepreneurship Programme), particularly, assessing innovative products and services that meet the needs of NHS organisations and populations.

Atena received her PhD in Health Studies at the University of Nottingham in 2017 where she investigated the prevention of unintentional child home injuries. Prior to joining CHIR, she was involved in several interdisciplinary studies including IMP2ART and had collaboration with renowned research groups such as UKMCRG. As a mixed-methods public health researcher, her primary research interest lies in the field of healthcare services and their effects on population health.

Dr Eleftherios Anestis

Dr Eleftherios Anestis is a Research Fellow at the Centre of Healthcare Innovation Research. He has worked in a variety of physical and mental health research projects on topics such as the lived experience of illness, healthcare communication, healthcare staff experiences of delivering care and the process evaluation of the NIHR-funded ODDESSI trial.

He is interested in the epistemology and methodology of qualitative research and the ways it can contribute to the design, evaluation and implementation of healthcare innovations. His current research at CHIR follows a mixed-methods approach to investigate the factors that facilitate or hinder the scale and spread of innovations.

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Nagina Khan

Nagina Khan is a Research Assistant at City St George’s School of Health and Medical Sciences. She holds a BSc in Biomedical Science, and an MSc in Health Economics. She has experience in health outcomes research and implications for cost-effectiveness.

Her current research includes economic evaluation of an AI-based diagnostic tool in oncology, and evaluating the broader impact of economic evidence around digital health technology.

Raheelah Ahmad

Dr Raheelah Ahmad is a Reader in Health Systems at the School of Health and Medical Sciences.

Raheelah leads the Health Management and Leadership and the Innovation and Change teaching on the Health Management MSc programme.

She contributes an international health dimension as well as key considerations from a knowledge mobilisation perspective at the macro-strategic level.

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