University Rd,
Belfast
BT7 1NN

Photograph of Minchen Liu

Min-Chen Liu is a Research Fellow in the School of Social Sciences, Education and Social Work, Queen’s University Belfast. She previously held a Research Fellow position at the School of Nursing and Midwifery, Queen’s University Belfast. Min-Chen’s research interests are minority group education, modern foreign languages, and digital education.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

 

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.