Crisis and Resilience is a cross-cutting collaborative theme, working with colleagues across Queen Mary. Our subthemes build on the different areas of Crisis management and research.
Sub- Themes

Violence is seen where there is poverty and inequality, displacement, and conflict – all factors on the rise worldwide due to geopolitical and climate-related crises. In the UK, there are continuous and growing issues with adolescent violence, domestic abuse, human trafficking, modern slavery, and gang-related violence. Many of these have been exacerbated by the COVID pandemic and associated economic crises. There is an urgent need to understand this violence pandemic in all its forms, and to bring evidence-based methods to bear to actively reduce violence and its impact worldwide.
The subtheme will focus on the physiological and psychological response to trauma and combine the diversities and commonalities of the response to abuse and violence, cross-cultural trauma response, and accessibility and access to care.
Knife Violence and Violence Reduction
Jonathan Kennedy, Reader in Politics and Global Health - WIPH
Paul Vulliamy, Clinical Lecturer, Center for Trauma Sciences -Blizard
Michael Carver, Clinical Research Fellow, Center for Trauma Sciences - Blizard
Hannah Cottrell, Centre for Global Population Health - WIPH
Mark Freestone, Reader in Mental Health, Centre for Psychiatry and Mental Health - WIPH
Jeremy Coid, Professor of Forensic Psychiatry - WIPH
Domestic and Intimate Partner Violence
Chris Griffith, Professor of Primary Care - WIPH
Paul Coulthard, Professor of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery - IoD
Philippa Williams, Reader in Human Geography - School of Geography
Will McMorran, Reader in Comparative Literature - School of Language, Literature and Film
Resilience and Recovery
Victoria Bird, Professor of Mental Health Care, Centre for Psychiatry and Mental Health - WIPH
Rosie Hunter, Executive Director, People's Palace - School of English and Drama
Dennis Ougrin, Adolescent Resilience Research Unit, Centre for Psychiatry and Mental Health - WIPH
Recovery after a crisis usually refers to the stage of getting ‘back to normal after a period of critical disruption due to a crisis. The recovery phase is usually the longest and requires an interdisciplinary approach to return to pre-crisis normalcy. This theme will explore the psychological approach to crisis recovery, explore conversations on who gets left out of conversations on regrowth, and cultural relativity in crisis management.
Unit for Social and Community Psychiatry
Unit for Psychological Medicine
Ania Korszun, Unit Lead for Psychological Medicine
Youth Resilience Unit
Dennis Ougrin, Centre for Youth Resilience Lead, Centre for Psychiatry and Mental Health
Jennifer Lau, Professor of Youth Resilience and Co-Director of thE Youth Resilience Unit
Over the last 3 years, staff at Queen Mary have responded to the pandemic in many ways, directing their expertise to understand the coronavirus and possible future pandemics; evaluating new vaccines and treatments, and understanding its impact on our health and society.
As one of the themes of research interest, the goal of Crisis and Resilience MDT is to pull together knowledge regarding existing pandemics in order to mitigate and prevent future global pandemic events. It is the responsibility of healthcare practitioners and researchers to share knowledge and data that can act as a guide for doing this successfully.
After a successful Pandemic Research Symposium hosted by Crisis and resilience, the following academics have been identified as some of the leading researchers at QMUL for their work on pandemics, specifically COVID-19 and Monkeypox:
Responding to the Pandemic
Professor Rupert Pearse, NIHR Professor of Intensive Care
Professor Patrick Kennedy, Clinical Professor of Translational Hepatology
Professor Angray Kang, Professor of Immunotechnology
Ms Imogen Skene, Senior lecturer Research Nurse, PhD Researcher
Understanding COVID-19
Professor Adrian Martineau, Clinical Professor of Respiratory Infection and Immunity
Professor Aine McKnight, Professor of Viral Pathology
Professor Nikolaos Donos, Professor & Chair of Periodontology and Implant Dentistry
Living Through the Pandemic
Dr Yize Wan, NIHR Clinical Lecturer in Intensive Care Medicine and Anaesthesia
Dr Vanessa Apea, Consultant Physician in Sexual Health and HIV, Honorary Senior Lecturer
'After' the Pandemic
Dr Paul Pfeffer, Consultant at St Bartholomew’s Hospital
Dr Deepti Gurdasani, Senior Lecturer in Machine Learning
Professor Suzanne Scott, Professor of Health Psychology & Early Cancer Diagnosis
Dr Alex Fowler, NIHR Doctoral Research Fellow & Clinical Research Fellow
Professor Chloe Orkin, SHARE Collaborative Director, Professor of HIV Medicine
Tissue regeneration is the process of renewal and growth to repair or replace tissue that is damaged or suffers from a disease (Boisseau and Loubaton, 2011). Wound repair is one of the most complex biological processes capable of the human body. This theme explores the cross-cutting methods of repair including emerging technologies and will be looking at subjects such as blast injury.
Xavier Griffin, Chair of Bone and Joint Health
Dr Yung-Yao Lin, Senior Lecturer
Jon Connelly, Professor of Bioengineering, Cell Biology and Cutaneous Research
Julien Gautrot, Professor in Biomaterial and Biointerfaces
Rob Hill, Professor of Physical Sciences in Relation to Dentistry
Adina Michael Titus, Professor of Neuroscience; Centre Lead for Neuroscience, Surgery and Trauma
Dr Karin Hing, Reader in Biomedical Materials, Education Lead - Centre for Bioengineering
Martin Knight, Professor of Mechnobiology, Dean for Research
Hazel Screen, Head of School, Professor of Biomedical Engineering
Terrorism or state-sponsored attacks are becoming more frequent and more complex around the world and are now almost inevitable in the future of any major city worldwide. Meanwhile, our critical national infrastructure, individuals, and emergency responders are becoming increasingly dependent on technologies that may be disrupted in an event by being overwhelmed or subjected to parallel attacks.
This subtheme explores: What can we learn from previous attacks? How can we predict and prevent future events? How can we make cities and critical national infrastructure more resilient to attacks? How can we protect and improve our emergency response to minimize the impact of events? What future technologies might be deployable in such events? How can we recover after mass casualty events, individually, institutionally, and as a society?
Trauma
Karim Brohi, Professor of Trauma Sciences, Crisis and Resilience MDT Lead - Blizard
AI and Technologies (Sensing, Robotics, Simulation)
Yang, Hao, Professor of Antennas and Electromagnetics -
Arumygam Nallanathan, Professor of Wireless Communications
Sean Gong, Professor of Visual Computation
Yue Chen, Professor of Telecommunications Engineering and Director of Education
Kasper Althoefer, Professor of Robotics Engineering, Head of Centre for Advanced Robotics
Steve Uhlig, Professor of networks and Head of School
Rosel Tallach, Consultant Anaesthetist at the Roayl London Hospital
London Air Ambulance
Lt Col Claire Park, Consultant in Pre-Hospital and Critical Care, Trauma and Anaesthesia
If you have a question about any of our research subthemes, please contact us at cpmr-mdt@qmul.ac.uk.