I am a professor of palliative medicine at the Hull York Medical School. I direct the Wolfson Palliative Care Research Centre at the University of Hull. My work focuses on how to improve the poor access to palliative care by people with non-cancer conditions such as heart and respiratory disease who suffer serious breathlessness – a disabling but neglected symptom. Our centre runs clinical trial research to find ways to help, but this research is difficult to do.

During my Fellowship I visited one of the world's only national palliative clinical trials collaborative in palliative care to see how we can do this better in the UK. I saw the importance of a 'bottom up, top down' approach to research in palliative care services to enable them to be research units.

Bringing this knowledge back to the UK has helped us to grow our own research at our research centre and elsewhere.

My visit also strengthened our collaboration with University of Technology Sydney, Australia. This led to a Research England-funded exchange programme (one of only eight awards in England) between the two centres, further building capacity to conduct life-changing research to help those with severe breathlessness.