Dr Runa Lazzarino, BA, MA, PhD is a socio-cultural anthropologist by training, and part of the Centre since November 2018.

Broadly, my research interests revolve around transcultural and global (mental) health/care, vulnerable migrants (victims of human trafficking, conflict, and exploitation), social and cultural norms and determinants of health, participatory interventions and evaluations.

For my doctoral project, I conducted a multi-country study on the recovery and reintegration of human trafficking survivors (UNIMIB, 2015). In my post-doc research, at UCL and UoN, focus was on post-exploitation support needs, particularly in relation to the consequences of different types of violence onto mental and sexual health of survivors.

Since joining the Research Centre for Transcultural Studies in Health (RCTSH) , I have been involved in several intellectual outputs of the ERASMUS+ IENE8 project “Empowering migrant and refugee families with parenting skills” – while also taking part as instructor in the MOOC of the previous IENE 7 project, around migrant caregivers. For IENE 8, I co-led with the head of Centre the development of a support and training package for health and social workers to provide culturally competent and compassionate support around parenting in refugeedom. I also contributed to other outputs, such as the creation of bite-sized learning units, the collection of refugees’ parenting stories, the design of a training guide, dissemination activities (newsletter, webinars, etc.); and I am now drafting a scientific article based on the project. At the Centre, I have also been involved in the mixed-method analysis of a multi-country online survey (with over 1200 respondents) around culturally competent and compassionate care among healthcare managers, out which the team is publishing four scientific articles; and I have taken care of coordination, validation, and launch of a second survey around the use of social robots in health and social care (countries involved #19). In relation to this survey, I will soon be leading the qualitative thematic analysis. Finally, I played a key role in two systematic reviews in social robotics (transcultural nursing and education, both recently published). Currently, I am involved in a cutting-edge multi-method study on the provision of spiritual support during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic in England.

Additional interests in my life include practicing and studying yoga, in all its forms, and visual expression, in all its forms.