The Global Goals

In 2015, UN member states agreed to 17 global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure prosperity for all. Tomasina's work contributes towards the following SDG(s):

About Tomasina

I am an Associate Professor based at the University of Plymouth, experienced in both research programme management and academic research.

From 2019 to 2024, I was Programme Lead for the NIHR-funded Dementia PersonAlised Care Team (D-PACT) project, which developed and evaluated a primary care-based model of dementia support.  Currently, I serve as Programme Lead (Strategy, Operations & Performance) for the Plymouth Mental Health Research Group (MHRG), a five-year NIHR-funded multi-partner programme focused on strengthening mental health research in under-served areas of England. The programme brings together people with lived experience, universities, NHS organisations and community partners to explore how system balance can be achieved within mental health care systems. In this role, I provide strategic and operational leadership, overseeing governance, delivery and impact.  Through these programme leadership roles, I have developed a particular interest in how large, multidisciplinary research partnerships can learn, adapt and improve over time, and in the leadership approaches that support effective collaboration and communication across different organisations, disciplines and perspectives.

Alongside this role, I remain active in research. My methodological expertise has been developed across a range of disciplines and includes linguistic analysis, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), realist evaluation and realist economic evaluation. I held an NIHR Dementia Capacity Building Fellowship (2022-2026), which supported my transition into applied health services research.   My research interests focus on advance care planning, person-centred palliative and supportive care, communication in serious illness, and the delivery of high-quality care in resource-constrained settings. I am particularly interested in how individuals, families and professionals navigate difficult conversations and decision-making in the context of uncertainty, including discussions about future care and support. A further area of interest is the meaningful involvement of people with cognitive impairment or who lack decision-making capacity in research as well as people from under-served communities, and the development of inclusive approaches that enable participation across all stages of the research process.   Across these areas, my work seeks to understand how formal and informal care can be organised and delivered to improve experiences and outcomes for patients and families while making the best use of finite health and care resources.

Supervised Research Degrees

• Waine, H. Functional grammatical development in children with Developmental Language Disorder
• Lim Li Koon, Reading processes in biscriptal children in Singapore
• Masnidah Masnawi, Imageability and verb-noun naming in Aphasia: Can the effect of grammatical class be reduced to differences in imageability?
• Philina Ng, Fusiform gyrus: Investigation of visual word recognition in the bilingual brain
• Seng Su Lin, Bilingual language control and switching

Teaching

Contact Tomasina

+44 1752 583287
tomasina.oh@plymouth.ac.uk