Dr Marisha Nanayakkara Bruce

Dr Marisha Nanayakkara Bruce is a Bioethics Specialist at Wellcome. As a member of the Bioethics team, she works to embed bioethics into Wellcome’s Research Programmes, focusing on mental health, climate and health, and infectious disease. In this role, Marisha also supports the ongoing management of Wellcome’s global bioethics investments. Marisha’s interests and experience span global health ethics, research ethics, mental health ethics, and clinical ethics. She has previously worked to coauthor patient-centric clinical guidelines to enable timely opioid withdrawal management in NHS hospital settings (Research Fellow, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine) and to develop ethics guidance for the equitable and responsible inclusion of pregnant participants in clinical research, with a special focus on HIV prevention and treatment studies (Research Associate, Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Georgetown University). Marisha’s doctoral research utilised an empirical ethics methodology to understand the normative commitments, explicit and implicit, in clinicians’ decision-making processes for involuntary psychiatric admissions (Ethox Centre, University of Oxford).