Joyce Kenkre is Emeritus Professor of Primary Care and member of the Promoting Lifelong Health research group. https://health.research.southwales.ac.uk/about-us/promoting-lifelong-health/ Prof Kenkre has wide ranging research interests and has published on the prevalence of heart failure, the cost of accidents in the elderly, evaluation of routine enquiry for domestic abuse, careers for nurses in research, fraud, care for young mothers and their children and analysis of large monitoring datasets for HomeStart.  She has been a lead or been a co-applicant on over £30 million research and infrastructure grants, and has conducted and supported over 100 research projects including the effect of new drugs, epidemiological, point of care testing, analysis of big data and evaluation of service provision.

Professor Kenkre is at the forefront of developing evidence-based community health models of work internationally through her membership of the European Rural Isolated Practitioners Association (EURIPA), which is a representative network organisation founded by family doctors to address the health and wellbeing needs of rural communities and the professional needs of those serving them across Europe, and the rural working party of the World Organisation of Family Doctors (WONCA) which represents family doctors/general practitioners globally. Kenkre is a member of WONCA's steering committee for the special interest group on Family Violence, which has led to an international study on policies and care strategies on how to deal with violence in the family context, being run in 28 countries: 18 in Europe, three in the Middle East, five in Africa, and two in Asia. She co-edited a special edition of the Journal of Nursing highlighting the study’s importance.

Notably, Professor Kenkre authored sections of the World Health Organisation's The State of the World’s Nursing 2020 highlighting the crucial role of nurses and midwives in rural areas and the need for research to improve the evidence base for practice.

More locally,  Professor Kenkre played an integral role in the development of the Clinical Research Collaboration for Wales (CRC Cymru) which was the initial major initiative to develop an all Wales infrastructure for research. She is a Director of MediWales, an organisation bringing together academia, clinicians and the medical device industry; and Associate Director of the Wales School of Primary Care Research, where she leads on chronic conditions and working with industry.