Ana Porroche-Escudero

Dr Ana Porroche-Escudero is a senior research associate at Lancaster Environment Centre where she works on the international project “Unlocking Resilient Benefits from African Water Resources”, funded by UKRI through the ARUA Water Centre of Excellence at Rhodes University, South Africa, in collaboration with African and UK country partners. 

For the past 17 years she has worked on issues related to gender, health and inequalities, cultures of knowledge, inequalities and feminist and qualitative methodologies. Her interests on inequalities, knowledge production and public involvement in research led her to join Lancaster Division of Health Research as a senior researcher for the NIHR Applied Research Collaboration North West Coast (ARC NWC) (2014-2021). In this role she worked closely with Prof. Jennie Popay to coproduce the Health Inequalities Assessment Toolkit and develop a theoretically informed approach to embed a health equity focus in research collaborations that they coined “Health Equity Mainstreaming”. She continues with work with SPHR and GroundsWell.  

While at ARC, Porroche-Escudero also completed 2 major evaluations that aimed to explain and bridge the evidence-practice gap. The first was CLAHRC-NWC internal evaluation drawing on implementation science and social innovation. The second project  was  the Neighbourhood Resilience Programme - an intervention and evaluation of local authority and community lead evidence-based actions to reduce health inequalities by promoting systems resilience in 10 neighbourhoods.