Fran McConville has been the Midwifery Adviser at the World Health Organisation (WHO) since 2013 and is based at the WHO headquarters in Geneva. Fran’s work aims to support the 194 WHO Member States to improve evidence–based quality midwifery care for all women, newborns and their families everywhere. This includes working with global partners to support research, advocacy, capacity building and ensuring the voice midwifery leaders. Prior to WHO, Fran was a Health Adviser to the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DFID) based in the London headquarters, as well as in Bangladesh and Somalia. Fran has development and humanitarian experience in sexual, reproductive, maternal and newborn health with UNICEF, International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), and a range of non-governmental organisations through living and working in Bangladesh India, Burma, Malawi, Kenya, Somalia and Iraq. Fran initially gained development experience as a VSO midwife in Bangladesh, and then through field work in Africa, Asia and the Middle East while being a lecturer in maternal and newborn health/ gender and reproductive health, at the University of Wales, Swansea. Fran is a midwife, a nurse, has an MA (Health Economics), and a BSc (Life Sciences). In 2020 Fran was awarded the title Honorary Professor of Practice at Queen’s University, Belfast.

Fiona Alderdice is the Senior Social Scientist at the National Perinatal Epidemiology Unit (NPEU) and Deputy Director of the NIHR Policy Research Unit in Maternal and Child Health and Care based in the Nuffield Department of Population Health, University of Oxford. Fiona has an undergraduate degree and PhD in Psychology from Queens University Belfast and her research interests in maternal and child health date back to 1992 when she first worked at the NPEU as a research fellow. She was awarded a Medical Research Council, Health Services Research training fellowship in 1998 to support her work on complex pregnancy. Fiona joined the School of Nursing and Midwifery, Queens University Belfast in 2002 and was promoted to Chair in Perinatal Health and Well-being in 2010. Fiona joined the NPEU in January 2017 while continuing to work in the School of Nursing and Midwifery until January 2019.  She was made an honorary Professor at Queen’s University Belfast in 2021. Fiona’s research interests are perinatal health and wellbeing and you can find out more about her research here.

Professor Glang holds the position of honorary chair. Her research interests include childhood brain injury prevention, teacher training, and strategies for helping teachers and families support children and adolescents with brain injuries.

Read more: https://cbirt.org/

Dr Audrey Mckinlay (ACC/HRC Research Fellow at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand) is an honorary senior lecturer in the School of Nursing and Midwifery at Queen's.

As a clinical neuropsychologist her research interests focus on childhood traumatic brain injury (TBI), with a particular focus on differentiating the effect of age at injury and the long-term outcomes for childhood TBI.

Dr Weimand is an honorary lecturer in the School of Nursing and Midwifery at Queen's.

Her research interests include impact of mental illness and substance misuse on children, parental mental illness, family wellbeing, workforce capacity to engage in family focused practice and strategies to promote meaningful and effective engagement of service users, carers and the public. 

Chantal Ski is Professor of Integrated Care and Director of the Integrated Care Academy at the University of Suffolk, United Kingdom.

Professor Ski, previously a Reader at the School of Nursing and Midwifery, continues close collaborations with researchers in the School, including Prof David Thompson, on several research projects and publications in the area of cardiovascular disease, e.g. lead on a Cochrane Review.

Dr Ahmed Al-Smadi is Associate Professor in Nursing at the Faculty of Nursing, Al al-Bayt University Jordan. 

Dr Al-Smadi is based in Jordan and will be working with Professor Kevin Gormley in MBRU (Mohammed Bin Rashid University). 

Dr Lei Clifton is Senior Medical Statistician in the Translational Epidemiology Unit, Nuffield Department of Population Health at the University of Oxford.

During her visit to our School in June 2019 Dr Clifton hosted a talk to a number of Lecturers and PhD students on the topic ‘How to design a feasibility randomised controlled trial – the experience of a medical statistician’.

Rolf Magnus Grung is assistant professor in habilitation and rehabilitation at the Department of Behavioural Sciences, Oslo Metropolitan University, Norway.

During his time at the School of Nursing and Midwifery at Queen's (April 2018), he presented a number of lectures to nursing students relating to problem behaviours in patients with intellectual disabilities.

Professor Kathryn King-Shier is a member of the Faculty of Nursing and Department of Community Health Sciences at the University of Calgary, Canada.

During her visit to Queen’s University (April 2018) she sought to extend research collaborations with Dr Chantal Ski and Professor David Thompson in cardiovascular health with a focus on gender and ethnicity. 

Professor Ann Bonner is Director of Research in the School of Nursing at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia. 

Professor Bonner presented her research to staff and postgraduate students on chronic kidney disease and sought to develop collaborative research projects with QUB staff in the Supportive and Palliative Care research theme (September 2017). 

Dr. Helen Chan, Associate Professor, from the Nethersole School of Nursing, Faculty of Medicine, The Chinese University of Hong Kong Shatin, New Territories, Hong Kong, met with staff in the school to identify and develop shared collaborative research interests on advance care planning and caregiving support for older adults and people with advanced progressive diseases (April 2018).

Dr Corine Verheven is Senior Researcher and Midwife at the Amsterdam Public Health Research Institute, VU Medical Centre Amsterdam, The Netherlands.  Dr Verheven worked alongside Dr Maria Healy and Dr Dale Spence to learn about the provision of midwife-led care across NI and to develop a systematic review on variations in midwifery care and practice during labour and birth.

Dr George Tzagkarakis of the Department of Electrical Engineering, Technological Educational Institute of Crete, Greece, visited the school in November 2017.  Dr Tzagkarakis was collaborating with Dr Maria Healy to analyse bio-signals from cardiotocography with the intention to correlate fetal heart rate with uterine contractions and fetal movement signals to assess fetal well-being.

Dr Viola Nyman is Senior midwife researcher at the Department of Research and Development, NU-Hospital Group, Trollhattan, Sweden. Dr Nyman, and five midwifery colleagues from Sweden, visited the school and midwifery-led health and social care partner sites to enhance understanding and possible future implementation of a guideline developed by Dr Maria Healy in Sweden 

Dr Fiona Lynn is a visiting scholar at the Federal University of Santa Catarina, Florianopolis, Brazil. 

Dr Helen Kerr was visiting scholar at The University of British Columbia Children’s Hospital, Vancouver, Canada in May 2017.

The purpose of the visit was to inform the development of guidelines relating to the transition from children’s to adult services for children with life limiting conditions.  

Dr Mark Linden was visiting scholar at the Centre for Brain Injury Research & Training, University of Oregon, USA in 2016.

This work involved consultation with Prof Ann Glang and her team at the Centre for Brain Injury Research & Training on outcome measurement for a newly developed classroom-based intervention.

Dr Esther Reid has been closely involved with charity working and teaching between midwifery students at QUB and those at Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda. She has sought to establish collaborative working arrangements with the Dean of Health Sciences: Dr Rose Nabirye and Lecturer: Dr Scovia Mbalinde