Donna is a Hand Therapist and Senior Clinical Academic for Occupational Therapy at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust (ICHT) and is an NIHR Imperial Biomedical Research Centre (BRC) Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Human Performance Group, Department of Surgery & Cancer, Imperial College London (ICL). Donna has extensive clinical experience with expertise in hand trauma and acquired, rheumatologic and surgical conditions of the hand and upper limb. Donna has a BSc in Occupational Therapy from Tufts University and an MSc in Health Sciences from the University of East Anglia. In 2018 she completed an NIHR funded Clinical Doctoral Research Fellowship, receiving a PhD in Pain Research from ICL. Her Doctoral work investigates the association of neuropathic pain phenotype with the outcome of carpal tunnel surgery.

Donna’s research interests include the evaluation and treatment of surgical and traumatic scars, the assessment of pain and sensory function and the outcomes of treatment in people with conditions of the hand and upper limb. Donna is currently working to develop a core outcome measurement set (COS) for the evaluation of scar in the hand and wrist (http://www.comet-initiative.org/Studies/Details/1503).

With support from the NIHR Imperial Biomedical Research Centre, Donna and the Pain Research Group recently developed a Patient Partner Panel. The aim of the panel is to better engage patients with chronic painful conditions as co-designers in the group's work. Interested patients can read more here or contact Dr Kennedy for further details.

Donna teaches and presents her work nationally and internationally. She is a member of the Imperial Wound Healing & Regeneration Network, the Royal College of Occupational Therapists and the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP). Donna participated in the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) Clinical Guidelines Update Programme as a clinical expert in rheumatoid arthritis (RA) in 2015 and in the British Society for Surgery of the Hand James Lind Alliance Priority Setting Partnership in 2017, contributing to the national research agenda.