Nancy Preston

Nancy Preston is a Professor of Supportive and Palliative Care. Her research focuses on the interplay between service provision and the experiences of those both running and experiencing services.

She is Co-Director of the International Observatory on End of Life Care at Lancaster University. This is a world leading research institute with international collaborations and PhD students. She is part of the Department of Health/NIHR funded Policy Research Unit for Palliative Care with four other university departments and was recently inducted as a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, UK. She has been part of eight European studies – the UK lead on half – which have underpinned developments in integrated palliative care internationally. She is part of the Lancet Commission on the Human Crisis in Cancer which reports next year.

Professor Preston’s research on experiences of family members and health care workers on assisted dying led to oral presentations to the British government’s Health and Social Care Select Committee on Assisted Dying in 2023 and the Irish Parliament Select Committee in 2024. She is the UK’s leading researcher on assisted dying with over 20 publications alone. To make her research more accessible she created a short film about assisted dying as part of the ESRC Festival of Social Science which she has also shown at international palliative conferences in the Netherlands, Italy, US and Canada.

With over 150 publications Professor Preston is recognised for her research expertise and is often invited to speak at international conferences, the radio and TV. She has supervised over 20 PhD students to completion, with much of this work leading to joint publications and follow on grants.