Dr Melissa Fielding (she/her)
Dr Melissa Fielding is an academic and researcher working as part of the Community Action Team at St Christopher’s Hospice. She holds a PhD in Political Geography from the University of Cambridge, where she wrote her thesis on the effects of the changing economic landscape on people’s capacity to care.
Utilising her arts background and research experience, she employs participatory and creative research methods in community settings to investigate everyday experiences of death, dying and loss.
Dr Simon Ruffell (he/him)
Dr Simon Ruffell is trained across three modalities: Western medicine (medical doctor specialising in psychiatry), research psychology (with a PhD in ayahuasca and mental health), and traditional plant medicine (student of curanderismo). He has worked on several major clinical trials investigating the therapeutic potential of psychedelics at leading universities worldwide, including at King’s College London exploring the effects of psilocybin on treatment-resistant depression. Since 2016 his work has been primarily dedicated to exploring the traditional psychedelic brew ayahuasca. He is CEO of Onaya Health and co-founded the not-for-profit Onaya Science, researching the effects of ayahuasca in naturalistic Amazonian settings in collaboration with universities, charities, and Indigenous-led think tanks worldwide. Simon’s work seeks to understand plants such as ayahuasca from both an Indigenous and a Western viewpoint, with the goal of generating a richer understanding of healing modalities. He is currently training in Shipibo Shamanism under Keyo Sui Rono and Don Rono Lopez.
Dr Bonnie Yuen (she/her)
Dr Bonnie Yuen is a Clinical Psychologist trained at UCL with a focus on working with the LGBTQ+ community and folks with intersecting identities. As a queer researcher from Hong Kong, she is interested in how deathand dying intersect with various aspects of identity, including sexuality, gender, and cultural belonging. Both her clinical practice and research are informed by the narrative framework, which she values for its ability to capture the nuances of diverse, complex stories. With narrative methodology, she has explored the journeys of sexual assault survivors and the psychological experiences of Hong Kong people during the 2019 Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement.Cllr Dr Manju Shahul-Hameed (she/her)
