Dr Claire A Wilson

Dr Claire Wilson MRCPsych PhD is a psychiatrist and academic at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King’s College London and South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust. She is also a Senior Harkness Fellow (2023-24; funded by the Commonwealth Fund).

Claire employs a lifespan approach to the development of healthy and resilient families. In her clinical practice she supports perinatal people and those planning for pregnancy in the community of South East London. Her clinical work and research focus on the intergenerational transmission of risk for mental health and disease and opportunities for intervention to prevent adverse developmental trajectories.

Claire’s areas of focus include the preconception and perinatal periods and although she is an epidemiologist by training, she uses a range of methodologies to translate her work from the level of the bench or the database, to the bedside, to policy makers and to the public. This includes policy orientated and clinically relevant evidence synthesis and co-design and evaluation of complex interventions.

She is particularly interested in how parental multimorbid physical and mental ill health and substance misuse come together in the preconception and perinatal periods to shape offspring outcomes across generations. During her Harkness Fellowship, she investigated the influence of racial inequalities on parental mental health outcomes.