We are pleased to announce the addition of three new members in CSIUS. All three of them are colleagues from the School of Health Sciences contributing to the expansion of our research capacity in Digital Health.

As an introduction here is more information on their work:

Dr Heather Baid

Dr Heather Baid, is a nurse who leads the intensive care modules within the Continuing Professional Education programme at the School of Health Sciences, University of Brighton.  She is also the BSc (Hons) Clinical Practice course leader and supervises Masters and PhD, post-graduate students.  Heather’s current research projects are focused on exploring how to reduce the environmental footprint of clinical healthcare practice with corresponding financial and social co-benefits.  She is also contributing to research evaluating the application of new technology and usability of secure and dependable systems which improve the sustainability of healthcare practice.

Dr. Natalie Edelman

Dr. Natalie Edelman is a Principal Research Fellow in the School for Health Sciences where she runs the Specialist Interest Group in Quantitative Methods & Statistics; and an honorary fellow in the Department of Primary Care & Public Health at BSMS. Natalie works predominantly in sexual health and applied epidemiology. Having previously used clinical prediction modelling in her NIHR fellowship she is now involved in digital clinical prediction rule development studies for targeting Pre-Exposure HIV Prophylaxis and for venous thromboembolism scanning among hospitalised Covid-19 patients. She works with infectious disease modellers at the University of Bristol and local colleagues at BSUHT and BSMS, including Dr. Liz Ford with whom she has recently conducted qualitative work to identify optimum design features for digital clinical prediction rules in General Practice.

Dr Catherine Aicken

Dr Catherine Aicken is a Senior Research Fellow in the School of Health Sciences. She is a public health and health services researcher, with a background in health promotion. She has an interest in e-health at the interface with patients and the public: as a tool for health promotion; for access to and delivery of health services; and more generally, online health-/help-seeking behaviours. Catherine’s research is interdisciplinary, and she employs both quantitative and qualitative methods in her empirical research. Her PhD research (attached to the UKCRC-MRC funded eSTI2 Research Consortium) comprised mixed-methods formative research on the development of a novel, award-winning, online sexual health service. Her recent e-health research has included systematic reviews of interactive digital interventions for sexual health promotion and HIV prevention (with University College London’s e-Health Unit). Catherine is keen to develop links with other e-health researchers at the University of Brighton, particularly regarding the development, implementation and evaluation of m-health interventions.

We welcome them and looking forward to their contribution to our Centre’s work.