Dr Grace Lucas

Overview

Grace is a Senior Lecturer in Mental Health and Society and Director for Educational Enhancement and Innovation for the School of Health Sciences. She joined City, University of London in Autumn 2017.

Grace completed her undergraduate degree in English at the University of Cambridge and after a short career in marketing, published her first book A Shape of My Own (Viking, 2006) / Thin (Penguin, 2007). Subsequently, she wrote and published a number of articles on mental health in the national press.

In 2011, Grace completed an MSc Medical Humanities at King’s College London and, in 2012, was awarded a School of Arts Doctoral Studentship at Birkbeck, University of London. Grace’s critical medical humanities thesis aimed to reinsert bodily and embodied experience into understandings of mental health. Throughout her studies, Grace worked as a qualitative researcher in health sciences and trained and worked as a yoga teacher. Unsurprisingly, Grace’s research interests are interdisciplinary with a particular focus on embodied methodologies and bodywork practices for the communication and representation of distress.

Grace has particular research expertise in qualitative methods and qualitative systematic reviews.

She is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and Module Lead for the Undergraduate Nursing Module 'Biopsychosocial Development Across the Lifecourse'.

Qualifications

• Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice with Distinction, City, University of London, Oct 2020
• PhD English/Humanities (Medical Humanities), Birkbeck, University of London, UK, Oct 2017
• MSc Medical Humanities, King's College London, UK, Sep 2010 – Sep 2011
• MA English (Cantab), University of Cambridge, UK, Oct 1997 – Oct 2000

Employment

• Senior Lecturer, City, University of London, Aug 2021 – present
• Director for Educational Enhancement and Innovation, City, University of London, Jun 2021 – present
• Lecturer, City, University of London, Jul 2019 – Jul 2021
• Research Fellow, City, University London, Oct 2017 – Jul 2019

Title of thesis: What difference does co-designing and co-creating actions with young people make to the development and delivery of policy and actions to create an urban environment that enables healthier food choices?

Oct 2019

Summary of research

Overweight and obesity has serious consequences for children’s short-term and long-term physical and mental health. Being overweight or obese as a child increases the risk of lifelong health problems, including type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, specific types of cancer, musculoskeletal disorders and depressive symptoms.

Policies designed to promote the health of children and young people rarely utilise a child-centred approach that puts those with the lived experience at the forefront. As such, there is often a disconnect between what policies suggest is good for the health of young people, and what young people suggest they require for good health.

One proposed approach to improving the relevance of policies or actions is to co-create or co-design these policies or actions with young people. However, the co-creation of public health policy has not been well studied or described in the literature, particularly in regard to the co-creation of policies or actions with young people to enable healthier food choices.
The PhD will therefore aim to answer the question: “What difference does co-designing and co-creating actions with young people make to the development and delivery of policy and actions to create an urban environment that enables healthier food choices?”

Publications by category