The National Institute of Health Research (NIHR) has awarded a Research Training Fellowship to Holly Cole-Hawkins, an Academic Clinical Fellow in the School of Oral and Dental Sciences.
Her PhD project, entitled ‘Survivorship in people with oral cancer and their partners – a mixed methods study’, looks at what it means to be a survivor of oral cancer, assessing their support needs, the impact of appearance changes and the effect on relationship dynamics.
It will be closely aligned with Head and Neck 5000, a national study of people with head and neck cancer being led by the University of Bristol.
Bristol graduate Holly hopes her research, to be conducted over three years, will inform the way people with mouth cancer are treated and lead to the development of interventions to further support them.
The project is based in the Lifecourse Epidemiology and Population Oral Health group which is led by Professor Andy Ness and funded by research grants from the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), National Institutes of Health (NIH), Medical Research Council (MRC) and the Wellcome Trust.