Sheri Oduola is a mental health nurse, social/psychiatric epidemiologist, and a fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Sheri gained a BSc in Mental Health Nursing from the Florence Nightingale Faculty of Nursing, King’s College London. She then completed an MSc in Health Services and Population Research and a PhD in Psychiatric Epidemiology at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London.

Clinically, she worked primarily with people living with psychotic disorders in inpatient and community settings.

Her research focuses on social factors that produce inequalities in the burden of mental health, mental healthcare, and long-term outcomes of severe mental illness in diverse populations (e.g., ethnic, gender minority groups and rural communities). She uses a mixed methods approach to make sense of complex health inequalities in minority groups by drawing on epidemiological techniques in electronic health records and qualitative approaches to explain why these disparities occur.

Sheri has been involved in several mixed methods and epidemiological research projects on psychoses and severe mental illness, including CRIS-FEP (supported by NIHR BRC Maudsley), MEDIATE (funded by NIHR – PDG), RESOLVE (funded by NIHR- HSD&R). She currently leads an NIHR-funded Mental Health Research Development project, which centres on bringing key stakeholders together and conducting extensive scoping work to identify mental health needs and priorities in Norfolk and Suffolk, particularly for the rural, coastal and migrant communities.  The findings from this initial work will lay the foundations for a larger-scale programme of research for the next five years.

• Epidemiology, and social influences of the aetiology, course and outcome of psychosis and severe mental illness
• Pathways to care and health service utilisation.
• Public mental health interventions
• Physical health outcomes in psychosis
• Young people's mental health
• At-risk-mental-state psychosis
• Health disparities in minority groups
• Mental health in rural and coastal areas

Sheri welcomes students interested in using epidemiological techniques (including electronic health records) for their PhD research.

As a Course Director, Sheri has demonstrated exceptional leadership skills. She designed, established, and led the first pre-registration MSc in Mental Health Nursing offered at UEA and enrolled the first cohort in 2019/20. She led the pre-registration MSc Mental Health Nursing course from 2019/23, which is a flagship School of Health Sciences course. Sheri also served as the Module lead for Research Methods across all fields of the MSc Nursing (i.e., Child, Adult, and Mental Health) programme between 2021 and 2024.

She currently teaches on the following modules:

HSC7201X – Principles and Practice of Health Research 1

HSC7204X- Principles and Practice of Health Research 2

HSC7206X – MSc Nursing Dissertation

HSCN6107Y- BSc Nursing Year 3 Option Module

Her teaching interests include:

Quantitative research methods

Ethnicity and mental illness

Sociology of mental illness

Psychoses

Sheri is a Visiting Lecturer and Researcher at King’s College London, SLaM Biomedical Research Centre and Cambridgeshire & Peterborough NHS Trust. And a member of the Mental Health Nurse Academics UK.