Dr. Marlaine Figueroa Gray
Designing rigorous qualitative studies across the full arc of a project — from conceptual framing and methodology to analysis, write-up, and dissemination.
Research approaches centered on dignity and participant voice, with particular expertise in serious illness, end-of-life care, and substance use.
Consultation on the ethical and practical use of AI in qualitative research — including narrative data, sensitive populations, and high-stakes clinical contexts.
A sustained focus on personhood, dignity, and legacy: what matters most to people as they face mortality, and how that knowledge gets documented and used.
My Approach
Collaborative
Research is stronger when every voice at the table is heard. I work as a genuine partner within research teams — supporting all members, investing in the development of junior scientists, and bringing multiple perspectives to bear on study design, interpretation, and meaning. Rigor is a collective achievement.
Patient-centered
Understanding the patient experience requires centering human dignity — in how questions are framed, how consent is approached, how findings are returned to communities. Drawing on decades of work alongside people living with serious illness, I keep the research anchored to what actually matters to them.
Trauma Informed
Serious illness, end-of-life experience, and substance use all carry histories that shape how people engage with researchers — and how safe they feel telling their truth. My approach is grounded in an understanding of how trauma shapes narrative and memory, and I hold that awareness across every stage of a study. Clinical pastoral education at Harborview Medical Center has deepened this practice: I bring to research the same quality of presence that spiritual care requires — the capacity to sit with difficult material and create conditions in which people can speak honestly.
Selected Areas of Inquiry
Medical Anthropology and Alcohol Use Disorder Research
Alcohol use disorder (AUD) is often framed in clinical settings through diagnostic criteria — but the lived experience of drinking, seeking care, and being labeled a "patient with AUD" is shaped by stigma, relationships, and the specific culture of the clinical spaces where care happens. Medical anthropology brings a critical lens to this gap: attending to how AUD is understood, named, and managed differently across patients, providers, and care settings, and to the unspoken norms that shape whether someone seeks help at all.
I bring this lens to a current qualitative study examining AUD management in in-patient settings, based at the University of Washington, working alongside a multidisciplinary team to understand how in-patient treatment for AUD influences patient readiness to make choices about their drinking behavior.
My attention to this population is informed in part by my clinical pastoral education training at Harborview Medical Center, where I worked directly with patients navigating substance use, trauma, and crisis — experience that grounds my research in the realities of how alcohol use intersects with illness, poverty, and survival.
Dementia, Kinlessness, and Methodological Innovation
This line of research examines the experiences of kinless older adults — those with no living spouse or children — at the time of dementia onset.
Our first study, published in the Journals of Gerontology (2023), documented the circumstances and unmet needs of this population; the second, in the Journal of Aging Studies (2023), developed a methodological approach using medical records and administrative documents as ethnographic data — a way of bringing systematically excluded people into qualitative inquiry.
This work has opened a promising new direction: using natural language processing to identify clinically relevant text, including chart notes and patient portal messages, as a basis for qualitative research with hard-to-reach populations.
Cancer, Young Adults, and Patient-Centered care
Adolescents and young adults with cancer occupy an understudied space — their needs differ from both pediatric and older adult patients, and existing care models have rarely centered their experience. A qualitative interview study in the Journal of Adolescent and Young Adult Oncology (2018) found that AYAs with advanced cancer navigated a difficult tension between hope and risk, often in the context of unclear prognostic communication, and wanted honest support in facing mortality alongside continued treatment.
A subsequent study in Cancers (2024) engaged AYA survivors to identify eight domains critical to holistic survivorship care and developed a conceptual model that places the patient and their support systems at the center — rather than the health system — and emphasizes the need for sustained navigation over time.
Legacy and serious illness
Our scoping review published in BMJ Supportive & Palliative Care (2024) synthesized three decades of literature and identified three intersecting legacy goals — how people wish to be remembered as individuals, in their relationships, and through their impact on others — finding these goals to be central, not incidental, to medical decision-making.
A following qualitative interview study in The Permanente Journal (2025) brought these questions into clinical practice, finding that serious illness often sharpened legacy goals even as illness and its treatment threatened people's ability to achieve them. Participants wanted to discuss legacy with their care teams — and believed their care would look different if teams understood what they hoped to leave behind.
Explore collaboration
Schedule a free 1:1 introductory session with me to discuss your research project.
FAQ
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I work best on studies where the human experience is central — serious illness, end-of-life care, palliative and hospice contexts, substance use, and related areas where qualitative depth matters.
I'm well suited to projects that need both methodological rigor and genuine sensitivity to participant experience, whether that's a new study, an existing project that needs qualitative support, or a team that wants consultation on design or analysis.
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Yes — and I find that work meaningful. I've spent years supporting researchers at all levels, including those coming to qualitative methods from quantitative or clinical backgrounds. I can help a team build fluency in qualitative design, develop interview guides and protocols, and think through analysis in ways that are grounded and defensible.
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Carefully and deliberately. AI can support certain aspects of qualitative work — transcription, preliminary coding, literature synthesis — but it raises real ethical and methodological questions in sensitive research contexts, particularly around narrative data and vulnerable populations.
I bring hands-on experience using natural language processing to identify clinically relevant text for research purposes, including chart notes and patient portal messages — work that sits at the intersection of computational methods and the interpretive judgment that sensitive data requires.I can help teams think through where AI is appropriate, where it isn't, and how to document those decisions transparently.
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Yes. I hold an affiliate faculty appointment at the University of Washington and am building active research partnerships across Europe, especially Germany and the Netherlands.
I'm experienced working across institutional contexts — navigating IRB and ethics board requirements, collaborating across time zones, and contributing to international research teams.
My consultancy is US-based, which means I can engage directly with federally funded studies and NIH-supported research teams. I'm currently based in Germany, which positions me well for European collaborations and EU-funded research initiatives.
Ich freue mich auf eine Zusammenarbeit — auf Englisch oder Deutsch.
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My hourly rate for research consultation is $175/hour.
This rate reflects 15+ years of experience in medical anthropology and qualitative health research, a doctorate and affiliate faculty appointment at the University of Washington, and specialized expertise in serious illness, substance use, and end-of-life research.
Rates for larger or multi-phase engagements, including grant-funded studies, can be discussed on a project basis.