Claire Hooker is Associate Professor in Health and Medical Humanities at Sydney Health Ethics and President of the Arts Health Network NSW/ACT. She undertakes research and advocacy in two areas - risk communication, particularly in relation to infectious disease, and the creative arts and health. She combines creative research methods, critical humanities scholarship, cognitive psychology approaches to risk perception and communication, and the history and philosophy of science, to produce new insights into ethical communication in health. Her approach centres a practice of listening to and honouring the perspectives and expertise of all knowledge holders and knowledge users, in order to create spaces where people from different backgrounds and disciplines can work together to improve health. Much of her research has explored the humanistic elements of doctors' experiences. With the Sydney Arts and Health Collective, Claire has recently used verbatim theatre and drama-based to understand and improve healthcare workplace training, culture and communication, through the Collective's play Grace Under Pressure, and the Grace Under Pressure workshops, which use acting techniques to build strong, values-based repertoire for communication.

Claire has published widely on risk communication in relation to infectious disease and has recently been prominent in the media in relation to COVID-19 response. She has published 4 books and over 50 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters on topics as diverse as non-representational theories of empathy and infection control, critiques of cultural norms in the medical humanities, the use of video-reflexive ethnography to improve hospital practice, and the history of radio astronomy. Most of her work is now available open access, some via the Sydney eScholarship Repository.