Dr Nayeli Urquiza-Haas, of Lancaster Law School, is part of a team that has secured a prestigious Wellcome Trust Discovery Award for a project entitled: Between deception and dissent: regulating unproven, disproven, or misleading health-related claims. Starting in 2025, the grant is for a total of 4.7 million pounds, and it will run for six years.

The Wellcome Discovery Awards scheme funds established researchers and teams from any discipline who pursue bold and creative research ideas to deliver significant shifts in understanding related to human life, health and wellbeing.

Specifically, this project will explore:

• How unproven, disproven, or misleading health-related claims are regulated in contemporary states
• Examine the socio-political implications of current strategies
• Imagine and propose alternative legal models

The Award will constitute a bold intervention into a complex social and legal issue, offering the first in-depth and cross-cutting interdisciplinary exploration of this highly pressing yet surprisingly under-explored matter.

Led by Prof Emilie Cloatre, at the University of Kent, this collaborative and multidisciplinary team also includes Prof Patricia Kingori, at Oxford University, Prof Martyn Pickersgill University of Edinburgh; Prof Mairead Enright, University of Birmingham; Dr Caesar Atuire, at University of Oxford; Dr. Nayeli Urquiza, Lancaster University (UK); Dr Tidiane Ndoye, at the Universite Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar, Senegal; and Dr Phoebe Friesen, at McGill University, Canada.

Bringing together their collective expertise in socio-legal studies, science and technology studies (STS), medical sociology and philosophy, the team will lead a theoretically informed empirical investigation of regulatory approaches in three regional zones: Europe (France, Greece, Ireland, and the UK); West Africa (Ghana and Senegal); North America (Mexico and Canada).

Overall, the project will bring together well-established qualitative methods, innovative cross-disciplinary strategies, and critical approaches to law and to the making of legitimate knowledge, to foster new scholarly and policy perspectives, and to push the boundaries of legal imagination.

In addition to its key empirical and conceptual contributions, this Discovery Award will aim to build capacity for interdisciplinary research at the crossroad of law and the health social sciences and humanities, disrupting persistent barriers to the development of critical knowledge on law, health, and society.