Research Community

Amanda Bonson is a PhD student and a qualified Cognitive Behavioural Therapist. She currently works as a Research Therapist at Combat Stress, the UK's leading Veterans' mental health charity, where she is delivering a novel treatment of moral injury to military Veterans. Amanda's PhD thesis will be an exploration of predictors of treatment outcomes for UK military Veterans with moral injury. Amanda has a special interest in translational research in clinical treatment of trauma, particularly in military and Veteran populations. 

Anna is a Research Associate at KCMHR where she currently leads the qualitative component of ADVANCE-INVEST, a long-term project investigating the experiences and outcomes of battlefield casualties who have left the military. She has previously worked on KCMHR 'Support to Families of Wounded, Injured, or Sick (WIS) Service Personnel – An Investigation of Current Service Provision' Study and 'Potential Gaps and Service Parents’ and Adolescents’ Challenges and Experiences' Study. Anna is particularly interested in post-deployment transition, Veterans and their families, peer support and co-production, Serving/ex-Serving fathers with PTSD and their families, and WIS Service personnel.

Bethany Croak is a PhD student and researcher at the King’s Centre for Military Health Research.   Bethany worked in NHS mental health services before joining King’s Centre for Military Health Research (KCMHR), King’s College London, four years ago. She has collaborated on various research projects focusing on the mental health of ex-Armed Forces personnel. Bethany is currently working as a research assistant on a project that aims to identify barriers to female Veterans making a successful transition into civilian life.  Bethany’s PhD focuses on the impact of COVID-19 on the mental health, well-being and occupational outcomes of lower-paid NHS staff and her research interests include occupational mental health and healthcare inequalities.

The Traumatic Stress Research Group is an interdisciplinary team with a mission to improve the health and well-being of individuals exposed to traumatic events. The organization aims to improve understanding of traumatic stress through high-quality, externally funded research, as well as develop effective and cost-efficient interventions for individuals experiencing psychosocial difficulties after traumatic incidents. They also aim to build strong interdisciplinary global collaborations, increase research capacity in the traumatic stress field, and disseminate evidence-based knowledge. 

The Centre for Blast Injury Studies at Imperial College was established in 2008 following Operation Herrick and aims to capture the hard-learned lessons that produced record levels of survivorship and learn lessons for future conflicts on how to further increase survivability. Their work aims to understand the long-term outcomes of survivors with previously un-survivable injuries and develop medical interventions for injured survivors as they age. The centre is interdisciplinary, bringing engineers, medics, and scientists together to address difficult issues, and translational- driving societal benefits and changes in acute medical care, equipment improvements such as PPE and vehicle design, testing of equipment through new surrogates for use in blast/trauma setting, and changes to relevant UK and NATO Standards

The Forces in Mind Trust (FiMT) Research Centre is an independent centre funded by Forces in Mind Trust and run by a consortium of RAND Europe and King’s Centre for Military Health Research (KCMHR) at King’s College London. The centre provides an accessible and authoritative evidence base exploring the transition from military to civilian life, to inform policy and practice affecting ex-Service personnel and their families in the UK. It also functions as a community hub for the UK Armed Forces research community, connecting researchers, policy makers, and service providers, to support the forging of joined up working and collaboration, and build pathways to impact. This is achieved through various outputs, including but not limited to, a accessible online research repository, informative themed research and policy summaries and primary research exploring key themes impacting the UK ex-Service community.