Helena Wilcox

‘I’m motivated to co-create pragmatic approaches that harness the best available evidence to equitably transform health through policy.’

 

Helena joined The Health Policy Partnership in June 2022 and was promoted to the role of Associate Director of Research and Policy in January 2024. She is Programme Lead for the Lung Cancer Policy Network and is also leading work on metastatic breast cancer, having previously been involved in projects on vaccine implementation and building equity in clinical research.

Before joining HPP, Helena worked as Research Policy Manager at Cancer Research UK (CRUK), leading the development of CRUK’s cancer inequalities research strategy and associated initiatives for equality, diversity and inclusion in research. At the University of Oxford, Helena built multi-stakeholder research capacity development programmes in the global south. Her work focused on research uptake into policy and practice through embedding policy, community and public engagement across the research cycle. Helena also has further health policy experience at Wellcome and in the pharmaceutical industry.

Helena holds an MSc in Global Health Policy from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, where her research assessed the impact of COVID-19 policy responses on gender equality. As an undergraduate, she gained a BSc (Hons) in Natural Science from the University of Bath, majoring in pharmacology.