Introducing our Postdoctoral Researchers
20/06/2026
We are delighted to welcome Ruby, Khalid, Cristina, and Tanvi to our Medicine without Doctors team. Alongside Dan and Kylo, the six researchers will continue developing our creative and playful research over the next five years.
Learn more about our postdoctoral research fellows below.
Ruby Reed-Berendt is a legal researcher in medical law and ethics, based at Edinburgh Law School. Her expertise lies in mental health and disability law, and in feminist and intersectional approaches to law and bioethics. In the abortion care case study, she will consider issues surrounding access to abortion services, care within services, and issues of structural and epistemic injustice, with a particular focus on intersections of disability and gender.
Dr Khalid Al-Muhandis is a researcher at the School of Social and Political Science, where he will be working on the Physician Associate (PA) case study. Khalid is a medical sociologist who draws on interdisciplinary influences across and beyond the social sciences. Tinkering with ethnographic, historical and speculative methods, he will explore the life of the PA and how this role figures within a wider constellation of healthcare realities and relationships. At a moment when the PA role in the UK is facing profound existential challenges, Khalid's work will grapple with what such challenges open up and how alternative futures for medicine and care might be collectively imagined.
Dr Cristina Moreno Lozano is an ethnographer of biomedicine and will be working on the Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Physician Associate (PA) case study. Her expertise lies on the study of transformations in public healthcare systems, medical interventions and programmes, and healthcare professions, in response to grand ecological, social and technological change (ranging from antimicrobial resistance, genetic testing or healthcare AI). In the AI-PA case study, she will explore how health care work is shared between diverse professions and software devices in the UK’s NHS, and how plural modes of medical work have been and are being imagined, practiced and experienced by professionals. Personal website: https://cmorenolozano.wordpress.com/
Dr Tanvi Kanchan is a researcher at the Usher Institute, where they will be working on the queer activism case study. Tanvi’s research sits at the intersection of queer theory, gender studies, digital media and political economy. Their doctoral research at SOAS, University of London explored queer and trans digital cultures and communities in India. Their work on Medicine without Doctors will explore online community networks of trans and queer healthcare in the UK.
Dr Dan Castro is an award-winning animator, designer and educator developing the playful research methodology. His work on the project explores how adults practice play and playfulness, and their potential impact on interdisciplinary research. He was once ranked 51st best stone skimmer in the world and writes about play on his research blog (www.plork.fun).
Dr Kylo Thomas (he/they) is a scholar-activist, abolitionist, and agitator based at The Love Tank CIC, where he is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the Queer Activism Case Study. Kylo's research draws on Black trans feminism and abolition to explore how communities on the margins exercise fugitive care to survive in, across, and below the medical-industrial complex. Kylo previously led the UK's first London-centric Transgender Needs Assessment (the second of its kind nationwide) and was a postdoctoral researcher on Doing Disability Futures, a British Academy-funded project exploring the lives of queer and trans disabled migrants and people of colour. Kylo holds a PhD in Science and Technology Studies from University College London, where he is now an Honorary Research Fellow. For more on Kylo, head to kylothomas.com