Dr Sian Oram is the Head of the Section of Women’s Mental Health and Reader in Women’s Mental Health at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience at King’s College London. Her research focuses on interpersonal trauma, its intersection with sex and gender and with institutional and societal structure, and its relationship to mental health. She has an interest in developing methods for safe, ethical, and participatory research with and by people affected by trauma and abuse, and has expertise in qualitative methods, evidence synthesis, and evaluation research.

Dr Oram directs the Violence Abuse and Mental Health Network, which works to understand, prevent, and reduce the impact of violence and abuse on mental health.  She is a co-investigator of the Violence Health and Society (VISION) Consortium, which aims to works to improve the measurement of violence to reduce its impact on health and leads its lived engagement strategy.  As Principal Investigator she directed the development of the Modern Slavery Core Outcome Set, which provides a minimum set of outcomes that should be measured as standard in future modern slavery research on interventions for survivor recovery and intervention. Between 2012-2015 she managed NIHR research to inform the NHS response to human trafficking. For more information, see the PROTECT (Provider Responses, Treatment, and Care for Trafficked People) project page.

Dr Oram holds a PhD from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM); her thesis explored the UK public policy response to the health needs of trafficked people.  Prior to this she studied BA Natural Sciences at the University of Cambridge and received an MSc in Reproductive and Sexual Health Research from LSHTM.

Teaching

Dr Oram is primary supervisor to:

• Laura Fischer, an ESRC-funded PhD student investigating the embodied experience of childhood trauma.
•  Dr Lauren Waterman, an MDRes student investigating mental health provision in immigration detention settings.   

Dr Oram leads the Women's Mental Health Research module for third year BSc Psychology students and supervises several MSc and BSc dissertations and projects each year.