If I’m made to choose three values I care deeply about and define the work these webpages are about, they would be KNOWLEDGE, LOVE and being TRULY ALIVE (though I don’t want to choose that brutally! It won’t be me and me relating to you if it’s not also about courage, freedom, honesty, compassion, as-if lost causes, hope in darkest hours, magic, friendship, adventure, repairing our broken world ...).

 

The core of the work I'd love to do for you, with you, or help you do for yourself is about generating and using evidence and knowledge in ways that are rooted in your everyday life and its most pressing needs.

 

If you are reading this with your company's hat on, I mean generating evidence and knowledge that can guide your decision making in highly practical and specific ways and that respects the expertise you and your people have developed through experience.

 

Sometimes this would be through quick-turnaround applied research (though I'm not your person for rough, ready and unreliable). Sometimes I'd suggest we infuse more classificatory and theoretical order into the study and take the time to do so. In the words of Kurt Lewin, "there is nothing more practical than a good theory".

 

If it's about your own life, it will be knowledge which helps you buzz around in your days with a clarity of mind, direction and purpose, and with a love of life and sense of wonder which only those who’ve turned knowledge into wisdom and inspired action can hope to do. 

 

Career-wise, I am a social, behavioural and health sciences researcher. I’ve spent most of my working life in academia, for longest at the University of Cambridge, Department of Public Health and Primary Care, where I am still a Visiting Fellow.

 

Prior to that, I did my PhD at the University of Exeter, with Professor John Dupré and Professor Susan Kelly. As a junior researcher, I was at Warwick Medical School, working with Professor Bill (KWM) Fulford and Professor Jeremy Dale.

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Since 2021, I’ve been working as an independent consultant, most recently with the Health Systems Resilience and Essential Health Functions team of the World Health Organization and with Acas, the UK Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service.

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I work primarily on mixed methods studies and am versed in both qualitative and quantitative methods (and I really dislike the distinction, it misses so much of the ‘other’ methods out there and the grey zones between those two).

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My PhD was on methods of research synthesis. It explored the theories, methods and practicalities of combining dispersed, often disjointed and contradictory, sometimes rigorous and sometimes questionable, evidence into a big picture providing strategic direction while also guiding low-level actions. (All this meaning that I also have a soft spot for systematic and other literature reviews and organisational knowledge management.)

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I am most interested and experienced in studies in complex and dynamic contexts, which require innovative, highly tailored and creative study designs. 

 

I prefer research which is applied and addresses urgent pain-point needs, even though I also have a taste for the hard-core theoretical, conceptual and systematic.

 

I can also help with writing up and dissemination needs, if you have piles of unanalysed data that have been lying around for months, even years, waiting for the quiet hours that never come. I've saved from oblivion a fair number of datasets and drafts, as if doomed not to see the light of day as coherent analysis.

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The topics and contexts I have the most experience in are digital health; health in development, humanitarian and emergency contexts; primary and community care; palliative and end of life care; and communication and coordination across settings and services. You can find the rest here.

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Mindset-wise, I am a psychologist with a strong streak of a philosopher and wordsmith. My training is in:

• Psychology: BA in Psychology and MA-level specialisations in Clinical and Counselling and Work and Organisational Psychology (Sofia University)

• Philosophy: MA in Philosophy and Ethics of Mental Health (University of Warwick) and PhD in the Philosophy of Science (University of Exeter)

• Literature: minor in English Language and Literature (Sofia University).

 

I am also a published author. So far, it’s been mostly of academic papers, but I recently had my first popular book published, "House Moving Therapy". It's a book about using the physical chaos of a house move and the need to sort through your possessions to also work through your inner, psychological chaos.

 

It's also a book about the search for one's true home, especially for those of us who've found it elusive, whether by being immigrants or troubled souls seeking something hard to pin down, or by finding it hard to buy a home of one's own without selling ourselves in the process.

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As a psychologist (though first and foremost as a person!), I am a compassionate, understanding and subtly sensing person who also has a thread of steel in her spine. I am here for you if you’ve messed it all up, if your feet are in the mud, head in a fog, and the rest of you lost along the way or in as-if eternal darkness. 

 

I won’t be scared by your darkness and your pain, no matter how badly you’ve been hurt or how repeatedly you’ve hurt others. I can work with you to re-kindle the tiny flame of light which has kept you alive, even if you feel it’s completely gone (it’s not; if it were, you would have been gone too). 

 

But I am just as good at unceremoniously kicking you out of your living-dead vegetative state; out of a life of excuses and justifications; and out of an everydayness where you talk, brood and wallow in self-pity rather than act, create and practise, with all the complexity and glory of having your heart committed and hands dirty.

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I live in Cornwall, England (though for somebody who’s moved 22 times in the last 20 years, that better be considered a temporary claim, with all my love for the dramatic Cornish seaside!). I do most of my work remotely but am also keen to discuss projects which require travel.

 

Let me know if I can help! Any of the contact methods here is good, though I am best at email.

 

Would love to hear from you!

 

Yours, 

Mila

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