Joan Aiken is a PhD student supervised by Dr. Teresa Rushe (Primary Supervisor) and Dr. Kostas Papageorgiou. Her PhD research will utilise a bio-developmental framework to further elucidate antecedents and causal pathways that lead to disparities in lifelong physical and mental health. Whilst the evidence for childhood trauma conferring a higher risk of adulthood ill health is robust, the biological mechanisms mediating this association remain largely unknown and this will be the primary focus of her research. Joan will also explore the interplay between early adverse circumstances and developing biological systems offering an opportunity to devise interventions that circumvent the negative impact of adversity.

Perla Fletes-Houston is a PhD student supervised by Dr. Teresa Rushe. Her PhD research focuses on Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) such as abuse, neglect, household dysfunction and violence and how they can lead to negative outcomes in emerging adulthood (18-25 y/o) across socioemotional and neurobehavioural domains. Her research further investigates mediating and moderating factors, such as parenting, attachment and individual characteristics, in the relationship between adverse childhood experiences and negative outcomes in emerging adulthood. 

Terri Downey is a PhD student supervised by Dr. Katrina McLaughlin.  Her undergraduate research thesis focused on the effects of age, gender and sensation seeking on domain-specific risk-taking in adolescents.  For her Masters' thesis, Terri conducted research in schools across Northern Ireland focusing on home learning environment, psychological motivations for parental involvement and their effects on child academic performance and socio-emotional factors.  Prior to commencing her PhD studies, she worked in a project developing a resilience curriculum for children and their families.  Each of these research areas has developed her interest in developmental psychology leading to her PhD studies on Fathers and the Intergenerational Transmission of Parenting.  This project will investigate adverse childhood experiences, attachment styles and mental health of fathers and their effects on child outcomes which will help inform future interventions for families from all walks of life.

Along with current students on the MSc Applied Developmental Psychology (formerly the MSc Psychology of Childhood Adversity), we are developing a study researching the intrinsic and contextual factors during development, which help protect young people who have grown up with adversity from negative outcomes. By researching young people who have demonstrated resilience, our aim is to identify protective psychological and contextual factors during development, which can be applied to the development of intervention strategies to aimed at reducing the impact of early adversity. Dr Katrina McLaughlin is a mixed methods researcher with significant experience in intervention research aimed at improving outcomes for children and families. She is currently PI on a number of projects including investigating the impact for children of parental incarceration, and an evaluation of the Fathers and Families Programme which is a parenting programme aimed solely at fathers. As we know, and despite evidence illustrating the postive impact father involvement has on mothers and children, fathers remain invisible in the design, delivery and evaluation of parenting programmes. Dr McLaughlin has also worked on a wide range of evaluations of interventions aimed at improving the psychological, social, cognitive and educational outcomes for young people.

The intergenerational transmission of adversity is well established and Dr. Kostas A. Papageorgiou Director of the InteRRaCt Lab  is running several projects including the Parents and Children Together (PaCT) project that explores the degree to which parents’ traits (e.g. personality traits) and adverse childhood experiences influence their children’s temperament, behaviour, symptoms of psychopathology, school performance and telomere length, a biomarker of adversity and longevity. Data are currently being collected from a large number of families and schools across Northern Ireland. The project will be expanded to include longitudinal data collection and it has implications for understanding how parental and child factors interact within a dynamic developmental framework to produce individual differences in children’s traits, behaviour and school performance.