Snow Scholar DPhil success

Congratulations to Rosamund Snow Scholar, Jeremy Leslie-Spinks, who passed his DPhil viva on 4 November 2025. His research tackles the communication gap between dancers and clinicians, offering new ideas to improve care for injured dancers.

Before Oxford, Jeremy spent his life in professional ballet, performing roles as a dancer, ballet master, artistic director and choreographer with leading companies around the world.

Through these roles, he witnessed first-hand how difficult it can be for critically injured dancers to communicate with clinicians who are unfamiliar with the demands of their art form. He noticed that each time, the dancer would try to clarify their genre-specific needs or the implications of their injury with little recognition from the clinician. Too often, this communication breakdown marks the moment where a dancer’s career is prematurely lost and this causes a major disruption to their lived identity.

In 2019, while running his ballet school in Germany, Jeremy was diagnosed with a degenerative spinal condition; clinicians seemed not to appreciate that this was his profession, not a hobby, and that losing dance was not an option. It was during this challenging period that he came across the Rosamund Snow Scholarship for Patient-Led Research.

Rosamund who died at 46, was the first person to study a PhD in her own condition (Type 1 diabetes). She was a respected academic at the University of Oxford and taught medical students extensively about the importance of the patient perspective. She used her own experience to question and challenge norms of medical practice, always striving to improve patient care. After her death, Rosamund’s family generously donated funding to Green Templeton College to allow others to be trained to continue the work she started.

Jeremy was thrilled to be awarded the Rosamund Snow Scholarship and says ‘I felt a kind of kinship between Rosamund’s experience of trying to establish dialogue with medical professionals, and the clinical communication issues my dancers and I, were facing’.

Because his subject area is relatively niche and he had limited prior experience in collecting and analysing this type of data, he had to learn much of the theory and practice as he went. He is extremely grateful to his supervisor, Professor Trish Greenhalgh, for guiding him through this unfamiliar territory.

Now that he has passed his viva, Jeremy will focus on disseminating and implementing his proposal. He plans to continue presenting at conferences, lecturing, and publishing his research to ensure it reaches both academic and clinical audiences. His ambition is to shift public perceptions of dance performance and to see Dance Medicine recognised as an integral part of clinical education.

Describing his experience as Rosamund Snow Scholar he says ‘I have loved every second of it’ and ‘I am more grateful than I can say for the support which has allowed me to be here’.

We are incredibly grateful for our wonderful donors, like the Snow family, whose generosity enables individuals to pursue research that they are passionate about and to make a tangible difference in the world.

If you’d like to help more students like Jeremy pursue meaningful research, you can learn more or make a gift online.