Meet the team
We’re devoted to putting the experiences of people with mental distress at the core of what we do.
Research Team
Vanessa Kellermann
Vanessa is a former NHS Peer Support Worker and the newest Lived Experience Researcher on Pegasus. As a Qualitative Queen (patent not yet acquired), her passion lies in uplifting the voices of those usually excluded from the frontlines of research to tackle existent power imbalances within the clinical and academic field.
Jessica Catchpole
Jessica is a lived experience researcher who is passionate about showing the brilliant things that people living with mental and physical health conditions can do despite of, and because of, their differences. She lives in Essex with her two cats.
Bethan Hatherall
Dr Bethan Hatherall is the Programme and Trial Manager for PEGASUS and a Research Fellow at City St George's, University of London. She brings to the role previous trial management experience of an innovative group-based intervention across multiple NHS Trusts and a commitment to ethical, equitable and rigorous research.
Jerry Padfield
I'm Jerry and I'm a Survivor Researcher on the PEGASUS project. Before PEGASUS I developed the award-winning mental health podcast and community radio show "A Space to Speak Your Mind " and worked with Mind to help co-produce the new mental health services for the NHS. My own lived experience is my greatest source of knowledge and informs everything I do.
Jacqueline Sin
I'm Jacqueline Sin, a mental health nurse-researcher. I co-lead the PEGASUS study. I am passionate about evidence-based practice as much as practice-based research; bridging research evidence into workforce education and service development. My work focuses on co-producing, evaluating and implementing innovative psychosocial interventions to improve people’s mental and physical health. I believe in using participatory approaches to amplify the voices of people with lived experience and to mobilise the social capitals embedded within our social-familial networks.
Dr Jayati Das-Munshi
Dr Jayati Das-Munshi is a Clinical Reader in Social and Psychiatry Epidemiology at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neurosciences, King’s College London and an Honorary Consultant Psychiatrist. She is passionate about applying innovative methods - whether it’s through data and linkages, or through working with partners across voluntary organisations, public health or government, or working closely with people with lived experience, to catalyse and understand what can be done to tackle and prevent mental health inequalities.
She has led studies using large-scale linked data to understand reasons underlying the high levels of deaths which are known to impact people living with severe mental health conditions. Much of her work focusses on underserved populations, and aims to maximise the potential of novel methods to understand the needs of these populations. Her work has informed policy in England and internationally. She is Co-Director for a newly established UKRI-funded Population Health Improvement- Population Mental Health Consortium. The consortium brings together academic, government, public health, voluntary organisation partnerships and people with lived experience across the UK, and will utilise large-scale linked data, to understand and evaluate population-level approaches to improve and address mental health inequalities. She is also co-lead for the Cohorts and Statistics platform in the ESRC-funded Centre for Society and Mental Health.
Graham A Hitman
Graham A Hitman is Emeritus Professor of Molecular Medicine and Diabetes at the Queen Mary University of London. He has an H-index of 89 and 353 peer reviewed publications (June 2024) related to the genomics of diabetes, pharmacogenomics and prevention strategies to prevent diabetes and its complications (14 in Cell, Science, Nature, Nature Genetics, Nature Communications and Lancet). He was as one of the principal investigators of the CARDS trial that has led to most people with diabetes being prescribed a statin.
Frank Röhricht
Consultant Psychiatrist, MD FRCPsych; Body psychotherapist; Honorary Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at the Wolfson Institute for Population Health, Queen Mary University London. Medical Director for Research, Innovation and Medical Education East London NHS Foundation Trust. I am passionate about co-production research and social inclusion, improving health care and wellbeing for the most disadvantaged groups in society.
Dr Kyriaki Giorgakoudi
Dr Kyriaki Giorgakoudi, SHPS Senior Research Fellow at City, University of London leads the health economic analysis for PEGASUS. She has expertise in economic evaluation and mathematical modelling and is leading health economics work-packages in a number of NIHR-funded studies.
Sarah Gibson
I am a survivor researcher with a particular interest in peer support and coproduction. I care about making sure people bringing our lived experience to research and to designing better support are well looked after. I want to be sure that people's voices that are often unheard are made louder by the way that we work together, that we are aware of power differences and work to even them out and that we all learn from each other as we work together.
Becky Moss
I’m Becky Moss and I am one of the researchers on the PEGASUS study team.
I am a firm believer that healthcare research is most powerful and relevant if it includes all stakeholders in every stage of the research cycle, right from developing its initial concept all the way through to dissemination and evaluation.
I’m proud to work in a system in which our healthcare is free at the point of delivery for all, and committed to ensuring services users are at the heart of everything we do, working alongside researchers as equal partners..
Richard Holt MA MB BChir PhD FRCP FHEA
Richard Holt trained at the University of Cambridge and the London Hospital Medical College. He is Professor in Diabetes and Endocrinology at the University of Southampton and an Honorary Consultant Physician in Diabetes and Endocrinology at the University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust.
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