About Me
I am a doctoral researcher at Queen Mary, University of London, specialising in how digital platforms shape chemsex practices, queer health, and public health policy. My journey has been deliberately interdisciplinary - spanning psychology, clinical practice, and visual cultures - and is grounded in both frontline healthcare experience and lived community knowledge. This unique mix allows me to approach chemsex not only as a clinical or behavioural issue, but as a deeply social, cultural, and political phenomenon that demands fresh perspectives.
My Journey
My path into research has been far from linear, and I see that as one of my greatest strengths. Before entering healthcare and academia, I worked in the creative industries, where I learned how to communicate ideas with boldness and impact. At ASOS and Net-a-Porter, I gained experience in digital strategy and audience engagement. Later, while managing creative campaigns for Marsh & Parsons, I developed the ability to translate complex ideas into visuals and narratives that resonate. These experiences gave me a strong appreciation for creativity, storytelling, and the power of design - tools I now bring into my academic work and public health communication.
Alongside my professional career, I have also trained as an nursing clinician at City St Georges, University of London and worked in frontline clinical settings such as the Emergency Department at King’s College Hospital. These high-pressure environments sharpened my clinical skills and showed me the realities of drug-and alcohol-related harm, trauma, and mental health crises-experiences that continue to shape my research and advocacy.
Community & Advocacy
Beyond the workplace, I am deeply engaged with LGBTQ+ communities. I volunteer with Impulse London, part of a global nonprofit that empowers gay men through health advocacy, events, and harm reduction. These spaces continually remind me that healthcare is not just medical - it is about community, culture, and care.
Sport and physical health are also central to who I am. I play rugby for the King’s Cross Steelers, the world’s first gay and inclusive rugby team. For me, rugby is more than just a sport; it represents visibility, solidarity, and pride. Staying fit and active keeps me grounded and fuels the resilience I bring into both research and advocacy.
My Research
Chemsex is one of the most urgent and complex challenges in contemporary queer public health. It sits at the intersection of sexuality, drug use, community, stigma, and pleasure - a space where health risks and liberation coexist. Yet despite its scale and significance, chemsex remains under-researched, often sensationalised, and frequently misunderstood.
Mainstream health communication has historically relied on sterile, clinical, or moralising frameworks. These approaches tend to focus on pathology and risk, often overlooking the lived realities of those most affected. This creates a disconnect: the very communities that public health campaigns aim to reach often feel unseen, unheard, or even alienated by the messages directed at them.
At the same time, digital platforms - particularly hook-up apps - have become central to how chemsex is organised, experienced, and imagined. These platforms shape behaviours, perceptions of risk, and community norms in ways that are powerful but still poorly understood in research and policy contexts. My work explores these intersections between digital cultures and queer health, asking how technology both enables harm and creates opportunities for care, connection, and resilience.
Through my doctoral research, I am developing an interdisciplinary framework that draws on psychology, medical, nursing, and cultural studies. This allows me to analyse chemsex not only as a behavioural or clinical issue, but as a social and cultural phenomenon deeply entangled with stigma, inequality, and the search for belonging.
My research is grounded in the voices and experiences of those directly affected. By amplifying lived experience, I aim to reveal the nuances often missed in policy or media narratives: the ways pleasure, intimacy, and resilience coexist with risk, trauma, and harm.
The ultimate goal of my work is to contribute to evidence-based, culturally relevant public health strategies. Strategies that:
Move beyond stigma and moral panic.
Speak honestly about pleasure as well as risk.
Centre harm reduction in both policy and practice.
Recognise the digital spaces where these practices unfold.
Engage queer communities on their own terms.
This is not just about filling a research gap. It is about reshaping how we talk about chemsex - moving away from fear-driven narratives and towards approaches that are honest, inclusive, and transformative.
Creative Experiments
In August 2025, I launched @chemsexscholar, a digital experiment designed to disrupt the way we talk about chemsex on Instagram. Using unapologetically queer, gritty visual storytelling, the project set out to ask a simple but urgent question: what happens when research leaves the confines of academia and enters the cultural spaces where people are already gathering, sharing, and seeking connection?
Within just a few weeks, the project reached tens of thousands of viewers and matched established data represented through previous studies on chemsex. The response was immediate and striking: people began sharing their own stories, challenging stigma, and opening up dialogue in ways that conventional health campaigns often fail to achieve. The platform quickly generated podcast invitations, international media attention, and community engagement that extended well beyond social media.
What began as a small experiment has grown into a case study of how research, creativity, and digital culture can intersect to spark change. By blending public health knowledge with design, campaign aesthetics, and lived experience, @chemsexscholar demonstrates that effective communication does not need to sanitise, censor, or abstract reality - it can be bold, raw, and rooted in the communities it seeks to reach.
This approach draws directly on my creative industry background, where I learned how to manage campaigns, build narratives, and use visuals to connect with diverse audiences. My time at organisations such as ASOS, Net-a-Porter, and Marsh & Parsons taught me that communication is as much about emotion and cultural resonance as it is about information. @chemsexscholar applies those lessons to public health: taking research out of journals and into the feeds, conversations, and digital spaces where queer communities live their everyday realities.
By doing so, the project highlights the untapped potential of digital storytelling as a tool for harm reduction, stigma reduction, and cultural transformation. It challenges the idea that public health communication must be sterile or clinical, instead showing that it can be artistic, confrontational, and deeply human.
My Vision
At the heart of my work is a commitment to changing the narrative around chemsex and queer health. Too often, these conversations are dominated by fear, moral panic, or policy frameworks that erase pleasure, agency, and lived experience. I want to move these narratives forward - to centre dignity, resilience, and care while still addressing risk and harm with honesty.
My PhD journey is the foundation for this work. Over the next several years, I will investigate how digital platforms shape chemsex practices, community norms, and perceptions of risk, while engaging directly with the communities most affected. For me, the doctorate is not just about producing a thesis - it is about building knowledge that has real-world impact. I see this journey as a space to test new ideas, collaborate across disciplines, and demonstrate how research can move beyond academia and into the lives, conversations, and cultural contexts where it matters most.
I want my PhD to achieve three things:
Generate original, interdisciplinary research that highlights the intersections of queer health, digital culture, and harm reduction.
Challenge stigma and reshape narratives, by amplifying voices often excluded from public health discourse and showing that pleasure and care can coexist with risk management.
Inform policy and practice, by producing evidence that is not only academically rigorous but also culturally relevant, accessible, and actionable for practitioners, NGOs, and policymakers.
Looking beyond the doctorate, I see my career developing in multiple interconnected directions. Academically, I want to publish, teach, and contribute to building queer health studies as a recognised field of knowledge. In public health, I want to consult with NGOs, government agencies, and international organisations to translate research into effective and inclusive policy. Through media and creative projects, I want to bring these issues into the public eye, shaping documentaries, campaigns, and cultural work that change how we talk about chemsex, stigma, and LGBTQ+ health.
Ultimately, my vision is to bridge the worlds of academia, healthcare, and visual culture. I want to be a researcher who is as comfortable in the seminar room as on the rugby pitch, as confident presenting at conferences as in creating a digital campaign. My goal is to use my unique blend of clinical expertise, creative communication, and community engagement to build a career that is intellectually rigorous, socially impactful, and unapologetically queer.
In short, I don’t just want to study chemsex - I want to transform the way it is understood, communicated, and addressed, leaving behind a legacy of research and practice that affirms queer joy, fights stigma, and creates spaces where LGBTQ+ communities can thrive openly.