Email: portico-services@ucl.ac.uk
Help Desk: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ras/portico/helpdesk
- Research Fellow
- Institute for Global Health
- Faculty of Pop Health Sciences
Dr. Palfreyman is a critical feminist global health researcher with a multidisciplinary background in sexual
and reproductive health and rights, maternal health, violence and mental
health. She has supported multiple international health programmes and
capacity- and partnership-strengthening initiatives across the Global South.
This work is complemented by extensive UK-based research with the NHS and Local
Authorities focused on understanding health needs and behaviour, service
access and delivery for vulnerable and marginalised populations.
Having held a range of research and programmatic
posts with the London School of Economics, Imperial College London, University
College London, and Options Consultancy Services, Ltd., Dr. Palfreyman has had
the privilege of working with expert academic and policy groups, and major
implementing/donor agencies including World Bank and World Food Programme, Unicef,
Dubai Cares, Vitol Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and many others.
Technical areas include:
- Sexual/reproductive health and rights
- Maternal health
- Global mental health and critical suicidology
- Gender-based violence / FGM
- Comprehensive school health and nutrition
- Access to and Quality of care
- Mixed methods research


Dr. Palfreyman's research emphasises the interconnectedness of SRHR, maternal health, interpersonal and self-directed violence and mental health. Her current mixed-methods research aims to develop adaptable, feasible packages of care to support the mental health of survivors of violence against women, modern slavery and conflict in South Asia.
She
is part of a multi- disciplinary, -institution, and -country NIHR-funded Global Health
Research Group generating new survivor-led evidence to shape promising mental
health responses for those affected by diverse forms of violence in
Afghanistan, India and Sri Lanka. Co-leading the Sri Lanka programme of work, she
is supporting an ambitious nationally representative survey capturing the
epidemiology of violence and mental distress amongst adolescents (15-24), and
qualitative evidence generation on survivors' needs, priorities and barriers to psychosocial
healing in the wake of GBV.
Dr. Palfreyman has worked in Sri Lanka for nearly
a decade on a variety of issues, most earnestly in centring the neglected
female experience of self-harm and suicide. Pushing for a gender-conscious
revolution in suicidology, her research argues that a continuation of the
current approach to suicide prevention is not only insufficient, but
potentially detrimental to the project of reducing risk and social suffering
for women and girls in Sri Lanka and beyond.