Charlotte Hemingway is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Institute of Resilient Health Systems, specialising in participatory action research to improve access to and uptake of preventative medicine.

She began her research career in the field of games for health and worked closely with health experts and professional game developers to co-produce and evaluate game-based interventions for Malaria control in sub-Saharan Africa and HIV prevention in Southeast Asia.

In 2021, Charlotte became a Doctor in Philosophy, her thesis was titled: Battle in the Blood, Development of a Mobile Game to Increase Uptake of HIV Services Among Young Key Populations in the Philippines: Mixed Methods Case Study.

As a Postdoctoral Research Associate she works with local governments, public health groups, community and primary care stakeholders to research the impact of community-led creative health promotion on addressing health inequities.

Charlotte’s current research activities focus on exploring the complexities and impact of digital and creative health promotion for cancer screening and infectious disease outbreaks.

She is principal investigator on Mpox: What’s Your Story – a nine-month project funded by the Pandemic Institute, to develop a community-led story-based public service announcement to raise public awareness of the emerging threat posed by the 2024 clade 1 mpox outbreak and efforts undertaken both overseas and, in the UK, to combat the threat. The project will be delivered in partnership with Liverpool City Council Public Health, Sahir House, and Writing on the Wall. The public service announcement will be developed through a series of collaborative writing workshops with people with lived experience of the 2022/23 mpox outbreak. Key messages will be identified through a literature review and interviews with key informants involved in current mpox outbreak responses both in the UK and in Sub-Saharan Africa. Charlotte will lead an ethnographic study to examine the process, dynamics, and outcomes of the collaborative workshops involving people with lived experience to understand how their participation shapes the design process.

Charlotte is also co-investigator on ReCITE: Building Research by Communities to Adress Inequities Through Expression – a three-year research study (2024-2027) in Liverpool, Knowsley and Sefton, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, Mobilising Community Assets to Tackle Health Inequalities programme. The research study will use community-based participatory research methods, including both qualitative and quantitative measures, to determine the impact of the ReCITE intervention, understand what worked, for who, and why, and to identify mechanisms to scale-up and sustain creative community-led efforts to tackle health inequities.