Lesley Fallowfield

Lesley Jean Fallowfield (born October 1949) is a British cancer psychologist and a professor of psycho-oncology at the University of Sussex. The main outcomes of her research have been the establishment of assessment tools to measure quality of life in clinical trials of cancer patients and the design of educational programmes to improve oncologists' communication with their patients.

Career Fallowfield initially trained as a nurse at Guy's Hospital in London before studying a bachelor's degree in experimental psychology at the University of Sussex in 1980. She went on to complete a doctorate in psychophysics at Sussex and the University of Cambridge. She had originally planned to pursue a career in visual science but the death of a friend from graft-versus-host disease secondary to a bone marrow transplant for acute myeloid leukaemia inspired her to focus on cancer. In 1984, she began working for the King's College London Clinical Trials Unit, where she is a professor of psycho-oncology at Brighton and Sussex Medical School and the director of the University of Sussex Health Outcomes Research & Education in Cancer (SHORE-C) group.

Honours 2008 - elected Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences 2009 - received the BMJ Group Lifetime Achievement Award 2010 - received Pfizer/BOA Excellence in Oncology Lifetime Achievement Award 2016 - appointed a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire 2019 - ESO Umberto Veronesi Memorial Award

Personal life Fallowfield has two children. Her son is a hepatologist and her daughter is a paediatric nurse.