Raquel is a specialist registrar in psychiatry and a Wellcome Trust Clinical PhD fellow with an interest in health inequalities, perinatal mental health and health systems strengthening.

Raquel completed her medical training at the University of Oxford following a Bsc in Neuroscience at University College London. She joined King´s College London in 2014 during her Academic Foundation training in Public Health and afterwards undertook research and clinical placements abroad in Mozambique, Ethiopia and Australia. She returned to the IoPNN in 2019 as an Academic Clinical Fellow while undertaking her Core Training in Psychiatry at South London & Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust. Raquel was awarded a NIHR pre-doctoral fellowship at the NIHR Maudsley Biomedical Research Center before she started her higher training in psychiatry at South West London and St George´s NHS Trust.

For her PhD, Raquel is interested in exploring how can we improve health care delivery to mitigate inequities in mental health outcomes. Using national routine health care data, she will study inequalities in pathways to mental health care and the long term outcomes of NHS Talking Therapies.

Research Interests

• Public Mental Health
• Health Inequalities
• Health Systems Strengthening
• Perinatal Mental Health
• Long term outcomes of psychological therapies

Research Groups

• Department of Psychological Medicine
• King's Women's Mental Health
• GenMind: transgenerational intervention for mental health

Expertise and Public Engagement

Raquel has a long-standing commitment to research in perinatal mental health and health inequalities.

She co-wrote a chapter on perinatal mental health for the 2014 UK Chief Medical Officer Report “ The health of the 51%: Women” and has written several book chapters and editorials on the topic as well as a commissioned analysis by the NHS Race and Health Observatory on “Tackling racism in maternal health” published by the British Medical Journal. She participated in the annual Harold Moody lecture on race equity in 2023.