Dr Francisca Stutzin Donoso

Position Governing Body Fellow Junior Research Fellow
School Clinical Medicine Department of Public Health and Primary Care
Email fsd26@cam.ac.uk
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Francisca is a clinical psychologist and public health researcher working in academia. Francisca's research interests are in the lived experience of chronic disease, the negotiation of risk-based decisions for health and wellbeing, and the ethics of public health interventions.

Francisca studied psychology at Universidad Diego Portales in Santiago, Chile. From 2011 to 2015 she trained and worked as a clinician with adolescents diagnosed with a first psychotic break, adults living with HIV, and parents navigating the child protection services in Chile. During this time, Francisca received an honours scholarship and completed a master’s degree in contemporary thought at Instituto de Filosofía, Universidad Diego Portales.

While working as a clinician, Francisca developed an interest in public health policy and social justice. In 2015 moved to London to pursue further postgraduate studies. She completed a master’s degree in philosophy, politics and economics of health at UCL. Her research focused on chronic diseases and the reproduction of disadvantages within universal health coverage systems. She continued to develop this work in her doctoral studies with Professor James Wilson and Professor Sonu Shamdasani.

While completing her PhD, Francisca was a member of the IME Bioethics Student Committee. She presented her work at the Postgraduate Bioethics Conference in 2018, the European Association of Medical Ethics Conference in 2019, the VALUEMED Conference in 2019, and the World Congress of Bioethics in 2020 and 2022. Her work has been published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Medical Ethics, BMJ Medical Humanities, and Globalization and Health. Francisca received her PhD in public health ethics and chronic disease from UCL in 2021.

In 2021, Francisca joined the Department of Public Health and Primary Care as a research associate in the CanRisk project funded by Cancer Research UK. She works on the implementation of multifactorial breast cancer risk prediction tools in different clinical settings. Her work has been published by the peer-reviewed journals British Journal of General Practice and the British Journal of Cancer.

Francisca’s research interests are on conceptual and practical questions about justice and wellbeing in public health. Her work focuses on better understanding the difference between how biomedicine and patients understand and navigate risk-based decisions about health, which are at the centre of most medicine practices today, from disease prevention to the day-to-day support and management of chronic diseases. In her work, Francisca explores how assumptions about what is good and lack of awareness about people's circumstances and preferences are common blind spots hampering health interventions from reaching their full potential. In her current role, Francisca’s work highlights the perspective of women and healthcare professionals who may benefit from cancer risk prediction technologies. She leads in the process evaluations of two studies, one looking into the feasibility, acceptability and psychological impact of using CanRisk in primary care, and the other, assessing the psycho-social, clinical and economic impact of conducting upfront CanRisk assessments in unaffected women referred to NHS clinical genetics clinics.

Francisca also led the co-design of the CanRisk report for patients and healthcare professionals, developed a CanRisk training programme for primary care professionals, and is a main collaborator in the user-centered design process of the MyCanRisk app. More broadly, Francisca is interested in the phenomenology of disease and illness; risk-communication, miscommunication and misunderstanding; epistemic injustice in healthcare; and shared responsibility and shared decision-making.

She is currently collaborating with an OUP-edited collection titled Crisis, inequity and legacy: Narrative analyses of the COVID-19 Pandemic edited by Camporesi, S., Mulubale, S. and Davis, D. This will be published in late 2024.

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A triptych of abstract images: a smooth round stone nestled in a curved rock, distorted eyeglass frames scattered on a white background, and a high-contrast black and white microscopic image resembling organic or cellular structures.

Art Exhibition: �鶹��Ӿ�at 60

07/06/2025 at 10.00

Celebrating Wolfson’s 60th anniversary year, this exhibition highlights the range of artistic disciplines and styles that have made up our exhibitions over the years.