Dr Whitehead is a HCPC-registered Clinical Scientist in Neurophysiology. She qualified clinically in 2010. While working in the NHS, she conducted research into seizure disorders. She then moved to the Department of Neuroscience, Physiology and Pharmacology (NPP) at University College London (UCL), and completed a PhD in neonatal brain development. Between 2019-2023 she was a Principal Investigator at UCL, and co-affiliated to the Institute for Women’s Health alongside NPP, to apply insights from fetal medicine to her newborn neurology research. From late 2023, Dr Whitehead has been a Senior Lecturer at King’s College London, in the Research Division of Digital Health and Applied Technology Assessment. She has a special interest in neuromonitoring technologies applied to neonatal/developmental, critical care and sleep medicine, and epileptology. Her research is highly cross-disciplinary, inspired by ideas from pre-clinical models and fundamental biosciences, and maths and computer science.

Teaching

Dr Whitehead leads module ‘Research Practice Experience 1’, within MSc/PGDip/PGCert Clinical Research Delivery.

She offers MSc project supervision for three of the college’s health faculties (her own Faculty of Nursing, Midwifery & Palliative Care; Life Sciences & Medicine; Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience), including:

• Enhanced Clinical Practice Dissertation
• Quality Improvement Dissertation
• Dissertation in Clinical Neuroscience
• Extended Individual Research Project in Healthcare Technologies

At undergraduate level, she offers research elective placements for BSc Nursing students, and is a supervisor for the Scholarly Project Module in Year 3 of Medicine MBBS. She also supervises summer research interns within the King’s Undergraduate Research Fellowships and Wellcome Biomedical Vacation Scholarships schemes.

She teaches on these post-graduate modules:

• Quantitative Research Methods
• Impact of Illness on the Individual and Society

She also teaches/assesses these pre-clinical registration modules:

• Practice of Children’s Nursing
• Promoting and Optimising Health in Children's Nursing
• Women’s Health
• Interprofessional Education - Promoting Patient Safety

Dr Whitehead is proud to be a mentor on the college’s Into Academia Ethnic Minority mentoring scheme for students.

Supervision

Dr Whitehead welcomes interest from prospective PhD/post-graduate students in areas centred on or interfacing with her research topics, and is experienced in supervising quantitative projects. She holds large fetal and infancy datasets, providing opportunities for innovative post-graduate projects addressing developmental medicine.

Enquiring about potential PhD supervision

If you’re thinking of applying for one of our PhD programmes and are looking for potential supervisors, please email nmpc_pgr_enquiries@kcl.ac.uk listing the names of the supervisors you’ve identified as having expertise in your chosen area, along with your CV and a short research proposal. 

Our Postgraduate Research Team will contact supervisors on your behalf and get back to you. If you have any queries in the meantime, please use the email address above, rather than contacting potential PhD supervisors directly, because they are unable to respond to initial enquiries.