Julia is head of the department of Palliative Medicine at the Royal Marsden and Royal Brompton NHS Trusts. She is a senior research fellow at Imperial College London. She is Chair of the Supportive & Palliative Care Group South West London, a member of NICE consideration panel for cancer, a member of the executive committee Association Palliative Medicine and Editor of the European Journal for palliative care (the journal for the European Association of Palliative Care). She has two main research interests. The first is in the inter individual variation in patients’ response to opioids. The second is the development of models of end of life care that include the seamless transition between the acute and the community sector, improve quality of life, decrease in the number of unnecessary hospital admissions and increase the number of patients being cared for, and dying in their preferred place.