I joined the University of Gloucestershire in 2022 after completing two post-doctoral posts at the University of Southampton and the University of Newcastle, and a PhD at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. My previous research has broadly focused on how people relate to the public health system and how they take actions to prevent infectious disease. My current work in climate change stems from a similar public health perspective.
I am module leader for NS7154 Understanding Health Contexts: From Cell to Society on the postgraduate Health Psychology MSc and am currently adapting a Psychology of Climate Change module for the undergraduate Psychology BSc. I also supervise dissertation projects at both an undergraduate and postgraduate level and support research methods teaching (with a focus on R Stats).
My main research interests involve examining why and how we: trust experts, judge risks, and seek information on contempary scientific issues. Much of my previous research has focused on vaccine hesitancy around the antenatal pertussis vaccine and the COVID-19 vaccination programme. In recent research I examine the global differences in risk-perception, response-efficacy and fatalistic (i.e. doom) beliefs related to climate change. I also have a passion for meta-science (the study of how science is conducted) and how changing the way we as academics conduct research can aid reliability and public understanding of our work.
More publications from Richard Clarke can be found in the Research Repository.