Vicky Austin

Vicky has worked for Miller Sands solicitors since December 2012. Vicky’s time is spent helping clients with probate work, lasting powers of attorney and will writing. Vicky worked as a teacher before training as a solicitor. She enjoys working with people from all walks of life and helping her clients through difficult decisions and situations. She has a particular affection for animals and especially those left behind when one someone dies. In her early days at Miller Sands she adopted an elderly black cat named Tlilli after a client passed away leaving Tlilli with the uncertain prospect of being rehomed.

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Corinne Duhig

Dr. Corinne Duhig teaches archaeology and Egyptology, mainly at Cambridge University, and runs the osteo-archaeology and funerary-archaeology consultancy Gone to Earth. She also spent 15 years assisting the police and coroners in suspicious-death cases and teaching forensic and biological sciences. Corinne's research is primarily on taphonomy and depositional ritual, interpretation of trauma, and physiological stress indicators.

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Alison Edwards 

Alison draws on her experience in chiropractic, cranio sacral therapy, touch and sound to support people at the end of their life. She seeks to support a natural approach to death and dying and to restore intimacy and a sense and honouring of the sacred within this. Alison uses a combination of bodywork (from the biodynamic craniosacral therapy and Tibetan healing and chiropractic traditions), active presence and listening and ritual when accompanying individuals at such times.

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Margaret Ginger

Margaret has worked for Cambridge Cruse Bereavement Care

as a Bereavement support volunteer for 25 years. She visits both

bereaved adults and children and young people in their own homes.

She says, "The detail of bereavement stories are always unique to each individual. My husband took his own life 30 years ago. I found a way to build a new life around that experience. It is always a privilege to help people find their own way to manage their distress after the death of someone close."

She is a supervisor and trainer and enjoys supporting Cruse volunteers in this valuable work.

She also leads a monthly group for people bereaved by suicide.

She was a counsellor at Cogwheel Trust for 20 years.

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Philip Hartropp

Before his retirement, Philip spent over 30 years as a full-time GP working near Peterborough. In 1999 to forward his interest in end-of-life care he undertook a Postgraduate Diploma in Palliative Medicine, and then, from 2001-2008, was the Cancer and Palliative Care Lead for a Primary Care Trust (PCT). Philip described his experience of working in end-of-life care as “one of the most satisfying aspects of my job, caring for patients and their families, through their final days of illness”. Philip is a board member of Dignity in Dying.

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Christianne Heal

Christianne is a psychotherapist, counsellor and healer in private practice in London and Cambridge who has a speciality in end-of-life and bereavement counselling. She has run award winning workshops on the subject of exploring our own death for over 20 years in England, Spain and Italy and has had a long standing interest in the subject of death. She will be performing part of her award winning interactive workshop Speaking About Death.

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Siôn Hudson

Siôn is a partner at Miller Sands solicitors. He has considerable experience in drafting wills, assisting clients with their estate planning, and administrating probates. Clients particularly appreciate Siôn’s friendly but professional manner when dealing with sensitive issues surrounding a death. Siôn originally comes from Anglesey in north Wales, he has lived in Cambridge since 2003. Outside of work, his interests include classic cars (he has five Volvos) and cooking.

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Human Anatomy Teaching Group

Dr Cecilia Brassett and Maria Wright will be sharing the benefits of whole body dissection for teaching our future doctors: Students find that they learn far more than just the architecture of the human body during their classes. Cecilia and Maria will give a brief introduction to their work in the Advanced Planning session. They can also answer all your questions about donating your body for teaching future medics in the display room, where they will be helping people all day.

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Human Research Brain and Tissue Bank

The Human Research Tissue Bank (HRTB) routinely supplies a wide range of human material for cellular and molecular phenotyping to a variety of research themes, including Cancer. The Cambridge Brain Bank (CBB) was established allow researchers access to brain tissue to investigate disorders of the nervous system including Dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, Motor Neurone disease and Huntington’s disease, as well as normal specimens as controls. They will give a brief introduction to their work in the Advanced Planning session, and available in the display room all day to answer your questions.

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Susan Elaine Jones

Susan's artistic work explores aspects of health, mortality and experience. She documents and blogs about representations of death in museums. She revisited her childhood memories of growing up with a ghost as something experienced and yet not believed and explores what that means to thoughts about life after death. Also considering the impact of long term ill health, and the insular isolation from society that it imposes, she considers life and death and what it means to her.

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Johnnie Moore

Johnnie is a facilitator based in Cambridge. He's worked with organisations around the world, and spends much of his time training other facilitators. He's also the founder of Unhurried Conversations, which are held regularly here in Cambridge and now in other cities as well.

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Carole Morgan

Carole manages Lifeline, Cambridgeshire Mental Health Helpline. Lifeline is a project of Lifecraft, a local user-led service for people with mental health problems. Carole is passionate about the work of Lifeline and believes with support people can find the capacity to help themselves.

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Ian Morris

Ian spent most of his ordained ministry in Hospital Chaplaincy before retiring after 12 years as Chaplain at Addenbrooke's in Cambridge.  He delighted in the response of a Midwife to a young, newly bereaved couple who insisted that they weren't religious:-"Hah! You ought to see our Chaplains.  They aren't religious either!"
He taught Bereavement Care to Hospital and Ambulance staff, and helped prepare Police Traffic and Firearms Officers for dealing with traumatic fatalities.
His book on dealing with our 100% human mortality rate "The motorcycle hearse and other undertakings" was published in 2006.

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Lorraine Moth

Lorraine has worked in Palliative care for a total of 23 years. She started her career as a very junior staff nurse at the Garden House Hospice in Letchworth, and currently manages a team of nurses and health care assistants. Hospice at home provides care to patients thought to be in the final two weeks of life. Lorraine is passionate about palliative care and believes we should adopt the principles of openness and honesty throughout our every day life. She has worked with patients at all stages of their journey from diagnosis to death. She writes: “I feel my personal strengths lie in my ability to maintain a human approach. A large part of my role is having conversations about death and dying and planning for death. I believe my work has influenced my approach to life positively, and feel privileged to work with patients and families.”

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Tracy O’Leary

Tracy founded Woodland Wishes, to offer simple and bespoke 'green' funerals in beautiful woodland burial sites using British 'earth friendly' coffins without the fuss and unwanted expense of traditional mainstream funerals. She aims to raise awareness of natural burial and memorial landscapes, where memories are not anchored in inscriptions on headstones but in and through the 'natural' world of butterflies, badgers and skylark's song, bluebells and leaves falling from trees. Woodland Wishes was a Good Funeral Awards winner in 2014. Tracy previously worked for the Cambridge charity, WinterComfort for the Homeless.

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John Pollard

John has a private counselling practice in Bury St. Edmunds and Cambridge. He is a graduate of the Philosophy department at Essex University and has worked in various mental health projects. He has written on the existential aspects of counselling and psychotherapy and is interested in how an awareness of death can lead to more authentic ways of living. He is also an abstract painter.

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Josefine Speyer

Josefine is a UKCP registered psychotherapist and clinical supervisor with a special interest in death education. She was a co-founder with Nicholas Albery of the Natural Death Centre (1991), and a co-founder of the Befriending Network (1994). She received the Life Time Achievement Award at the Good Funeral Awards in 2016.
For over twenty years she has run death education workshops, discussion groups, courses and talks and was a supervisor at a bereavement service for many years She has hosted Death Cafés in London, Oxford and Lewes and hosts Natural Death Salons at her house in NW London.

Ros Taylor

Dr. Ros Taylor MBE is the current Clinical Director for Hospice UK. She is a leading figure in the hospice and palliative care sector with more than 20 years’ experience of both providing and championing quality, person-centred care for terminally ill people and their families.
Dr Taylor has previously noted that:
"The UK’s rapidly increasing ageing population will lead to substantial extra demand for hospice care in the coming decades. Hospices will have a vital role, not only in developing innovative ways to support care, but also in educating and partnering with other organisations and local communities to provide responsive, relevant and kind care.”

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David Warner

David was bereaved by his father's suicide at the age of 3 and years later is still trying to understand more about this complicated subject. Although now retired David has worked as a Gestalt counsellor in private practice and with several mental health organisations in Suffolk and Norfolk, volunteered as a visitor with Cruse Bereavement Care in West Suffolk, attended SOBS meetings in Ipswich, death cafes in Cambridge and recently started the Ipswich Death Café with a colleague.