The Centre for Urban Wellbeing Associate Members

Professor Sarah Aldred is an exercise biochemist interested in oxidative stress. She is interested in how exercise can perturb redox homeostasis in both health and disease. Sarah has worked with young and old, and with those suffering from psychosis and schizophrenia, cardiovascular disease and dementia. 

Sarah is Head of the School of Sport, Exercise and Rehabilitation Sciences.

Hareth is a Professor of Health Economics, with a track record of innovation in health economics, and current interest in studying real-world resource allocation decisions. He has experience across a wide range of quantitative and qualitative methods.  Hareth is head of the Health Economics Unit, Associate Editor for Social Science and Medicine, and sits on the shortlisting panel for ...

Siddhartha is an internationally recognised economist in the field of political economy and public policy. He was the recipient of the Duncan Black prize awarded by the Public Choice Society in 2015 for his work on the electoral incentives of prosecutors with Bryan McCannon. His work on political coalitions has been published in internationally leading journals and has been widely cited by ...

Dr Susanne Börner’s research focuses on youth everyday agency, emotions and urban well-being in the context of interconnected urban crises. Susanne is particularly interested in the experiences of those growing up and living ‘at the margins’, such as children and young people as well as multi-generational contexts of knowledge generation. Her Marie Curie Global ...

Matthew is an academic psychiatrist and Director of the Institute for Mental Health at the University.  He is a leader in the field of early psychosis and in the philosophy and ethics of mental health.

Dr Shushu Chen is an Associate Professor in Sport Policy and Management at the University of Birmingham, UK, and a Visiting Professor at the Capital University of Physical Education & Sports, China. Her principal research interests include sport policy analysis and evaluation, and major sporting event legacy studies (particularly in the areas of impact evaluation). She is a British Academy ...

My scholarship is interdisciplinary and centres on the literature and culture of New York City, queer writing, and modern American poetry.

Professor Jennifer Cumming is a community-based researcher with expertise in sport and exercise psychology.  She works collaboratively with clubs, organisations, and services in innovative and creative ways to develop and/or evaluate psychosocial interventions for improving performance, personal development, health, and well-being. 

Dr Roxanne Douglas specialises in bringing together feminist theory, World-Literature theories, and Gothic studies, with a focus on Arab feminist writing in translation. She is also interested in women’s writing across borders, gendered history, sexuality studies, World-Systems approaches, and GoHoW (Gothic, Horror, and the Weird) across literary forms.

Catherine is an Honorary Professor of Public Policy, with a specific interest in urban governance and public policy.

Charles is a Geographer and trained planner with research and teaching interests in strategic planning/regional governance, community involvement, housing supply/affordability and planning history. His ESRC-funded doctoral research focused on the Green Belt, England's housing crisis and the planning system and is published in a range of practitioner and academic outlets. Charles' research is now ...

Victoria is a pedagogical researcher in sport, physical activity and health. Her main research area focuses on social media/digital technologies and young people’s health and wellbeing, and she is interested in the professional learning needs of teachers/coaches.

Professor Greaves conducts internationally recognised research on health behaviour change. He develops and evaluates practical behavioural interventions to prevent and treat chronic illnesses.

After completing an undergraduate degree in geography, Anne has spent nearly all of her career conducting applied research of relevance to academia and policy in research centres/ institutes in the higher education sector.

She started her career at the Centre for Urban and Regional Development Studies (CURDS) in Newcastle. Apart from a short stint at the Department for City and Regional Planning ...

Dr James Gregory received his doctorate in political theory before moving into social and housing policy research.  His housing research started at the Fabian Society, where he was a Senior Research Fellow. James is interested in homeownership, asset-based welfare, and neighbourhood research. In addition to a number of think-tank reports, James has recently published papers in Critical ...

Kelly is a Reader in Social Policy based in the Department of Social Policy, Sociology and Criminology. She is the Director of Global Engagement for the School of Social Policy and Society. 

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David is a physical geographer with interdisciplinary research interests focusing on three complementary themes within hydroclimatology (interface between hydrology-climatology): (1) hydroclimatological processes within alpine, Arctic, mountain and glacierized river basins; (2) climate and river flow regimes; and (3) river energy budget and water temperature dynamics. He has cross-cutting ...

My research and teaching areas span twentieth- and twenty-first-century writing, with a particular focus on the history and theory of the novel. Most recently, I’ve been working on the politics and poetics of affect in contemporary fiction and life-writing, combining my interests in the history of emotions, disability studies, and narrative medicine.

Dr Phil Jones is a cultural geographer who focuses on issues related to the city.  His work deals with a number of research areas including urban regeneration, cycling and the arts.  He has a particular interest in research methods, including qualitative GIS, mobile interviewing and arts-based approaches.

Dr. Gerald Jordan’s programme of research examines how young people  transform their lives and communities following a serious mental health challenge; and how such transformations are shaped by personal, social and community-level determinants of health and resilience that are, due to issues of intergenerational injustice, increasingly becoming difficult to access . He conducts his ...

Dr Irina Kuznetsova's research expertise includes areas of migration, forced displacement, health, and critical urbanism. Her recent projects focus on social consequences of population displacement in Ukraine, Russia, Rwanda, Nigeria and Japan, including mental health and well-being, and the impact of migration on rural communities.

Dr Rachel Lilley is a practitioner academic with expertise in environmental  and social change.  Her research has included a world leading project on improving decision making and collaboration in government, building  psychological capability in Senior Leaders through research and a training intervention using behavioural economics and attention practices such as ...

Zena Lynch is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Birmingham where she is lead for the MSc Environmental Health programmes.  Previously she worked as a Health Policy lead in the West Midlands and also as a lead practitioner for Environmental Health departments.  She investigates interactions between housing and health and the impact of poor and insecure housing on people’s ...

Dr Mazaheri is an expert on the role of oscillations in cognition and behaviour. His research focuses on the neural interactions underlying different facets of  cognitive control in both the healthy and clinical populations.

Francis is an environmental scientist with wide ranging interests in the atmospheric sciences, human health and sustainable cities. He trained as a physical chemist and he uses this fundamental knowledge to develop novel instrumentation and probe systems of interest. 

Francis has active research projects in the broad areas of air pollution, climate change, fundamental aerosol chemistry and ...

Dr Quinton is interested in how positive youth development approaches in sport and community settings improve emotional regulation, social connectedness, and mental well-being in young people. Dr Quinton uses sport psychology and pedagogical theories to understand how young people’s backgrounds and support needs influence their development, engagement, and motivation to learn and perform in ...

Louise is Associate Professor of Governance and Public Policy at the Institute of Local Government Studies and School Deputy Director of Research (Impact)

Louise has written widely on agenda setting, multi-level governance, policy change, and wicked problems. She is particularly well known for her research on transport governance, and the wellbeing agenda.

Her work has been published in leading ...

Darja Reuschke’s research concerns changes in local labour markets and new forms and locations of work and businesses that are emerging through new technologies, economic restructuring, crisis and social change. One focus of her research has been on self-employment and home-based work and how these forms of working are connected with social context, city regions, housing and neighbourhoods. ...

Daniel Wheatley is Reader in the Department of Management. He is the Director of Postgraduate Taught Programmes in Birmingham Business School, having previously acted as Director of Undergraduate Programmes (2018-2021). His research focuses on workplace well-being including job quality, work-life balance and flexible working arrangements, spatial dimensions of work including work-related travel, ...

Dr Kate Woodcock’s research interests can be summarised as aiming to investigate and explain human behaviour by considering multiple potential influences at different levels of explanation. For example, people’s genes, their brain structure, their brain functioning, cognitive, physiological and emotional functioning can all affect people’s behaviour both individually and in an ...

Rebecca is an Honorary Research Fellow for the four-year AHRC-funded project, ‘Forged by Fire: Burns Injuries and Identity in Britain, c.1800-2000’.

Rebecca is a historian of medicine and of Quakers. Her research and publications centre on the history of psychiatry, mental health, neurosurgery, neurodiversity, and First World War medicine and disability. She has worked with ...