Meet The Team

MeCareNWL is a study led by a research team at Imperial College London

Dr Dasha Nicholls

Dr Nicholls is a Clinical Reader who leads the Child and Adolescent Mental Health research team in the Division of Psychiatry. Her research focuses on risk factors and early intervention for disordered eating behaviour, seeking practical and scale-able solutions, from parent training to policy change, that directly influence outcomes. She is also a practising Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist in CNWL Children and Young People's Eating Disorders Service. Dr Nicholls is a past chair of the Eating Disorders Faculty of the Royal College of Psychiatrists (RCPsych) and was a member of the RCPsych Board of Trustees and the International Advisory Committee. She has served on the NICE guideline committee for eating disorders, the NICE quality standards committee, the NHS England Expert Reference Group developing the commissioning guidance for children and young people’s eating disorders services (CYP EDS), and helped develop the Quality Standards for CYP EDS. Dr Nicholls is a Past President of the Academy of Eating Disorders, and instigated development of the British Eating Disorders Society.

Richard A. Powell

Mr Powell is a Project/Evaluation Manager working in the multi-morbidity theme of the NIHR North-West London Applied Research Collaboration. After an early research career in mental health in the UK, he spent the last fifteen years in East Africa, working in palliative / end-of-life care, women’s health (including female genital cutting) and sexual / reproductive health generally. A referee for multiple academic journals, Richard was the founder and coordinator of the African Palliative Care Research Network, a member of the research committee of the International Children’s Palliative Care Network, a member of the steering committee of the International Palliative Care Family Carer Research Collaboration, and a co-chair of the European Association of Palliative Care’s Task Force on Palliative Care in Africa. He is currently on the Executive Committee of PALChase, the Palliative Care in Humanitarian Aid Situations and Emergencies network, focussing on addressing the palliative care needs of refugees and others in vulnerable crises.

Dr Victoria Burmester

Dr Burmester is a Research Associate in the Department of Brain Sciences, Faculty of Medicine. She is currently researching the reward mechanisms underlying binging and purging behaviour as part of the Mood Instability Group. In addition, she is part of the Child and Adolescent Mental Health team and has investigated the use of visual stimuli in eating disorder research, oxytocin polymorphisms and negative interpretation bias in bulimia. She also supervises BSc/MSc projects and lectures on the MSc Translational Neuroscience module. Recently, Dr Burmester co-designed a quick-response study into children’s eating and Covid-19 quarantine.

Dr Ed Waddingham

Dr Waddingham is a clinical research statistician. In addition to applied work on observational studies, clinical trials and meta-analyses, he has published a number of papers on advanced statistical methodology, covering topics such as pharmacoepidemiology, multivariate statistics and benefit-risk decision-making. He is currently based in the Brain Sciences department at Imperial College London and is also affiliated with the Imperial Clinical Trials Unit.

Jehanita Jesuthasan

Ms Jesuthasan is a research assistant and has previously worked at the Nanyang Technological University Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine where she was involved in research examining the mental health and cognitive impacts of Chronic Kidney Disease. She completed her Bachelor’s in psychology in May 2020 at the University of Bath and is planning to pursue a career in mental health and health psychology.