A pharmacist health services researcher, Dr. Gray’s research interests are in self-care, self-medication, health literacy, online health information and child and adolescent health and wellbeing. She has internationally-recognised expertise in the use of technology to share information about health, wellbeing and medicines, including:
- Research underpinning one of the first studies in the field of adolescent use of online health and wellbeing information sources;
- The interplay between accessing online wellbeing information and the use of offline sources;
- Research and policy expertise in heath literacy in the online space, and young people’s use of social media;
- Co-creating a website with young people where they could access information about mental health medications;
- Using innovative blogging methodology with young people who live with chronic illness, and their parents, so that they could express their feelings about health, identity formation and wellbeing.
She was awarded a Harkness Fellowship in International Health Care Policy in 2001 by the Commonwealth Fund of New York City, which supported a pioneering study of adolescents’ use of the Internet for health information, and US health services and policy, in the USA in 2001/2. She was awarded Fellowship of the US Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine in 2010 for research and national leadership in adolescent health, and Fellowship of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society in 2018.
Dr. Gray has also been appointed in 2022 by the UNESCO Health and Education Section as a Technical Advisory Group member for the first UNESCO School Health and Nutrition Global Status Report. She has been engaged by PMNCH as one of the lead authors on a BMJ Collection of papers to underpin preparation for the forthcoming multi-agency Adolescent Wellbeing Global Summit in 2023; she is lead author for an analysis paper on Education, Skills and Employability.