Chair, Session 2: Pandemic Preparedness and Building Resilience
Rusi Jaspal is Pro Vice-Chancellor (Research & Knowledge Exchange) and a Professor of Psychology at the University of Brighton. He is a Chartered Psychologist and a Fellow of the British Psychological Society, the Academy of Social Sciences, the Royal Society of Arts, the Royal Society of Public Health, and the Higher Education Academy. Professor Jaspal’s research cuts across the fields of psychology and public health, focussing particularly on social psychological approaches to promoting good psychological and physical health outcomes. He has developed the Health Adversity Risk Model (HARM) to predict the impact of social and psychological stressors and identity threat on health outcomes. Much of his research using the model has focused on HIV prevention, HIV care and mental health. Rusi Jaspal has contributed to the development of Identity Process Theory and has conducted extensive research into aspects of psychological wellbeing among gay men, the management of identities in conflict, national identity, prejudice and discrimination, public understanding of science, technology and medicine and the psychological impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Rusi Jaspal is the author or editor of 6 books, and has written over 200 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters.
Research in crises enables us to understand their antecedents and consequences in real-time so we are better prepared for future crises and thus more resilient in the face of them. In crises, researchers from all disciplines, of all theoretical traditions and from distinct methodological perspectives must come together to develop questions, answer them and implement their findings. We need to ask ourselves how our research will enable us to promote positive change in the wake of a crisis – the answer to this question determines the significance of the research we do.