Meet the ARK Team


ARK staff at ARK away day June 2018

 

The ARK team is located across Ulster University and Queen's University Belfast. At Queen's, the team is based in the School of Social Sciences, Education and Social Work. At Ulster, the team is based in the School of Applied Social and Policy Sciences.

The following list contains the names and positions of the ARK team, just click on a name for more details:

 

Professor Ann Marie Gray

Ann Marie Gray is Co-Director of ARK, and Professor of Social Policy in Ulster University. Her research interests are in the area of health and social care policy, policy making in Northern Ireland, gender and social policy and social attitudes.

Dr. Paula Devine

Paula Devine is Co-Director of ARK, and is coordinator of the ARK Ageing Programme, which supports engagement between the age and academic sectors. She also coordinates the Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey.

Her research interests focus on quantitative research methods; measuring social attitudes; dissemination of social research; men's health; masculinity and gender.

 

Gemma Carney

Dr. Gemma Carney joined the ARK Ageing team in January 2014, and is a Senior Lecturer in Social Policy and Ageing in the School of Social Sciences, Education and Social Work, Queen's University Belfast (QUB).

Gemma trained as a political scientist, specialising in gender equality policy (TCD, 2004). A stint as Policy Analyst at the Irish Senior Citizens Parliament in 2007 introduced her to social policy for older people, and she has never looked back.

She teaches ageing at undergraduate and postgraduate level and is Disciplinary Lead for Social Policy at QUB. Her work has been published in Age, Culture, Humanities, Journal of Aging Studies, Gender and Society, European Journal of Ageing, Journal of Women & Aging, and Ageing & Society, of which she is a member of the editorial board.

 

Alexandra Chapman

Alexandra Chapman is an early career researcher and lecturer at Ulster University, School of Applied Social and Policy Studies. Her research interests are in the area of adult social care, childcare and family policy. 

Her PhD on adult social care was supported by the ARK Ageing Programme. Her work has been published in Journal of Poverty and Social Justice, Journal of Integrated Care and Health and Social Care in the Community.

Photo of Erin Early

Erin Early is a Lecturer in Social Policy at Ulster University. She previously held Research Fellow positions at University College London and Queen’s University Belfast. Erin’s research interests are centred around secondary data analysis and social inequalities, particularly in education, health and the family.

Photograph of Adrian Grant

Adrian Grant is a Lecturer in Politics at Ulster University and is currently the CAIN Transformation Project Lead. His current research focuses on the everyday experience of conflict and division in urban settings. Much of his work focuses on the conflict in, and about, Northern Ireland. He has worked extensively in research on the legacy of conflict, particularly on the role of oral history and urban policy in addressing division.

Sinead Grant

Sinead works as part of the ARK team within her role as clerical assistant in the School of Applied Social and Policy Science at Ulster University.

Goretti Horgan

Goretti Horgan is Policy Director of ARK, and a senior lecturer in Social Policy at Ulster University. Her research interests are child rights and women’s rights, especially child poverty, welfare reform and poverty among disabled people.

Katrina Lloyd

Katrina Lloyd is Director of the Kids' Life and Times survey.

Her main research interests are in quantitative methods, monitoring children's opinions on issues that are important to them, children's health-related quality of life and the mental health of children and young people.

She has extensive experience in analysing large-scale and complex datasets and teaching quantitative research methods at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. She has edited two books and has written a number of reports, book chapters and journal articles

Brendan Lynn

Dr Lynn is Deputy Director of Conflict Archive on the Internet (CAIN). A graduate of the University of Ulster, he has taught history at the same university and at Queen's University Belfast.

He worked on the Dictionary of Irish Biography and has written extensively on developments in nationalist politics in Northern Ireland since 1945

Elizabeth Martin

Elizabeth Martin became a member of the ARK Ageing Team in 2014 when she was awarded additional funding to support her in completion of her PhD.  She is now a lecturer and Social Policy Programme Director in the School of Social Sciences, Education and Social Work, Queen's University Belfast.

Her research interests are mainly around giving a voice to marginalised populations.  Her PhD was on older women and domestic abuse, and her MA on people who were disabled as a result of the Conflict in Northern Ireland.

Mike McCool

Mike was employed as Research Assistant on the Ulysses Project from 1990-93 based at Magee after finishing his first degree.

He was then employed by the Faculty of Engineering as a Computer Officer and subsequently seconded to the Interactive Systems Centre (ISC from 1993-97 as Research Officer/ICT Manager on the TALENT Project at Magee.

In 1997 he was seconded to INCORE/ARK until 2007 when he was made permanent as ICT Manager.

He has published over the years and his main roles consist of system administration (Unix), database administration, web site design/development, graphic/multimedia design, A/V production, systems programming and provides a supporting role to his colleagues.

He is currently working on several projects for INCORE, ARK and CAIN.

Martina McKnight - Survey Manager

Martina McKnight is the Survey manager within ARK and is primarily involved with the Young Life and Times and Kids' Life and Times surveys.

Her research interests include gender, young people, conflict and transition in Northern Ireland and qualitative methods.

Martin Melaugh

Dr Martin Melaugh is Director of CAIN (Conflict Archive on the Internet; cain.ulst.ac.uk). CAIN is an associated project of INCORE and ARK. Martin previously worked in the Centre for the Study of Conflict at the University of Ulster.

Photograph of Dirk Schubotz

Dr. Dirk Schubotz has been with ARK since January 2003. He is a Professor in Social Policy, based at the School of Social Sciences, Education and Social Work at Queen's University Belfast.

Dirk's main responsibility in ARK is to look after Young Life and Times and ARK in Schools , but he has also been involved in the creation of ARK's qualitative archive on ageism (www.ark.ac.uk/niqa) and in the design and delivery of research methods training activities specifically designed to support voluntary sector organisations.

Dirk's main research interests lie in the development and application of participatory research methods - in particular work with peer researchers; in biographical methods; sexual health; community relations; as well as more generically in young people.

Dirk's PhD thesis focussed on the professional biographies of teachers involved in the small planned integrated school sector in Northern Ireland.

Bob Miller

Robert Miller is an Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Queen's University, Belfast. He was a co‑founder of ARK and is a former Associate Director.

His career focused on questions of social mobility, broadly conceived; beginning with quantitative academic survey work as Research Associate and then Principal Investigator on the project ‘Determinants of Occupational Status and Mobility in Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic’, the benchmark study of social mobility in Ireland, and continuing with often highly controversial applications of mobility techniques to the investigation of religious discrimination and gender and political involvement in Northern Ireland. He helped create the European Sociological Association at the beginning of the 90s and served a term as its General Secretary. He moved to qualitative biographical methods in mid-career and directed Euroidentities, a major European Commission-funded investigation of European identity.

He is now largely retired but maintains an interest in academic life, mainly through the use of in-depth family histories to investigate poverty escapes and the intergenerational transmission of poverty within families in developing countries.

Gillian Robinson

Gillian Robinson is Emeritus Professor of Social Research and ARK Associate at Ulster University. Based in the School of Applied Social and Policy Sciences, Gillian worked with colleagues to establish ARK as a cross-university resource (with Queen’s University Belfast) providing access to social and political information on Northern Ireland in 2000.  She has been involved in the monitoring of social attitudes in Northern Ireland since 1989 and was co-director of the Northern Ireland Life and Times survey series. She led the ARK Ageing Programme at Ulster University.

Gillian co-ordinated the Accounts of the Conflict project www.ulster.ac.uk/accounts, a digital archive of personal accounts of the conflict in and about Northern Ireland. This archive is a valuable new addition to the CAIN (Conflict Archive on the Internet cain.ulster.ac.uk ) web resource. Gillian worked closely with INCORE (International Conflict Research Institute www.ulster.ac.uk/incore) where she was Director 2003-2008.

Her research interests include peace monitoring, social attitudes, gender roles, policy development in transition and research methodology including issues around researching violent societies and comparative methods.  She has published extensively on these issues and has led teams that have developed over 40 online publicly accessible databases. She is the 2003 Eisenhower Fellow from Northern Ireland.

Nicholas Whyte