Doctor Laura Dennison

Laura is a Health Psychologist. She is a member of the Centre for Clinical and Community Applications of Health Psychology Research Group, a HCPC registered Health Psychologist, a Chartered Member of the BPS, and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

 Research

Broadly speaking, her research interests cover two key (and sometimes overlapping) areas. One is understanding and facilitating psychological adjustment to chronic diseases. Her focus is on enabling individuals and families to live well with health conditions and she has a particular interest in patients with neurological conditions including multiple sclerosis and motor neuron disease.  Her work is centred around exploring how patients experience health conditions, interventions and therapies, and how patient perspectives can be used alongside psychological theory to develop and evaluate interventions.  Her second research interest is in digital health, particularly investigating digital interventions to change health-related behaviour and improve psychological wellbeing.  She uses both qualitative and quantitative methods in her research and tends to work within multidisciplinary teams.

Teaching

Laura is Module co-ordinator for PSYC2026: Introduction to Health Psychology, a large UG module where students cover a range of Health Psychology topics and get the opportunity to think like a health psychologist; developing ideas for interventions and working with case studies.

She is occasionally involved in other UG and PG teaching in Psychology (Research Methods, MSc Health Psychology) and contributes to the Psychology as Applied to Medicine curriculum in the Faculty of Medicine.

She supervises third year psychology undergraduate research projects, MSc Health psychology and Clinical Psychology dissertations, 4th year medical student projects (BMedSci) as well as PhD and DM researchers.

Her teaching experience includes serving as Subject Lead for psychology for two undergraduate programmes in Medicine (BM4 and BM5) with responsibilities including curriculum design and review, teaching, and assessment.