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Wolfson Institute of Population Health
  1. WIPH
  2. Centres
  3. Centre for Psychiatry and Mental Health
  4. Youth Resilience Unit
  5. CREATE project
  6. UK Team

UK Team

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This team consists of research staff and arts therapists from Queen Mary University, Brunel University, Edge Hill University, Newcastle university, and University of Hertfordshire.

 

Professor Jennifer Lau

Jennifer earned a Psychology degree from UCL, a PhD from King’s College London on gene-environment interactions in youth depression, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the US National Institute of Mental Health. This fellowship involved exploring the role of genetic variants on neural circuits and information-processing. She was then appointed Lecturer in Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford, where she started the Researching Emotional Disorders and Development Lab.

At QM, Jennifer is a Principal Investigator on a number of externally funded projects exploring mechanisms of and interventions for child and adolescent anxiety, depression and loneliness. More recently, she has become interested in the role of social connections in building resilience, well-being and good health in young people but also people with serious mental illness.

Dr Laura Paulauskaite 

Laura is a postdoctoral researcher in social sciences with a background of applied research in mental health, psychology, and intellectual disability. She attained BSc in Psychology (City University of London), MSc with Distinction in Clinical Mental Health Sciences (University College London), and PhD in Social Sciences (University College London). Over the years, Laura has worked in research and clinical settings with people with mental health problems and intellectual disability.

Laura’s research focuses on mental health, psychology, and education of marginalised populations such as children and adults with intellectual disability and/or mental health problems, child labourers, and exploited children. In her PhD research project, Laura has developed the first stakeholder consensus-based Core Outcome Set of Relationships and Sex Education for and with students with intellectual disability. Laura has a keen interest in participatory research that reflects voices of communities that traditionally have been silenced in research e.g. children and young people with intellectual disability. 

 

Professor Veena Kumari

Veena obtained a PhD in Psychology from Banaras Hindu University, India in 1993 prior to joining the Institute of Psychiatry, London for post-doctoral research. She became a Beit Memorial Research Fellow in 1999, a Wellcome Senior Fellow in Basic Biomedical Science in 2002, and Professor of Experimental Psychology in 2006 at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience (formerly known as the Institute of Psychiatry), King’s College London, UK.  Since 2018, Veena has been a Professor of Psychology and the Director of the Centre for Cognitive and Clinical Neuroscience (CCN) at Brunel University of London. She has been a PI on several externally funded projects focussing on neurobiological assessment of cognitive and affective processes (including development of novel paradigms to achieve this) in schizophrenia, depression and personality disorders, and development and evaluation of current or potential drug/psychological therapies for these disorders. More recently, she has expanded her research focus to include adolescent mental health and the impact of social and environmental factors on brain function and mental health across the life span.

Professor Vicky Karkou 

Vicky is the Director of the Research Centre for Arts and Wellbeing at Edge Hill University and an internationally known academic and researcher in the arts and arts therapies. She has had external funding successes of over £10 million on projects adopting diverse methodological approaches from systematic reviews, meta-analyses and randomised controlled trials to realist evaluations and arts-based research. 

She is involved in the NIHR-funded ERA trial, contributing to generating evidence of the effectiveness of arts therapies in community settings. She leads on the Arts4Us project, one of the largest research awards on the arts, arts therapies and children's mental health (£2.5 million) funded by UKRI and involving over 50 collaborators and partners. She also leads on research on the wellbeing of staff having received funding from the Wellcome Trust, and Health Education England.

She is the co-founder of the Arts for the Blues project, an evidence-based psychological group interventions which, in collaboration with colleagues from the University of Salford, has been scaled up nationally and internationally.

Dr Catherine Carr

Catherine is a Senior Clinical Lecturer in music therapy at Queen Mary University of London and a music therapist working in the UK National Health Service in mental health care. Her research focuses on developing arts therapies interventions for different contexts and evaluating through systematic reviews, randomised controlled trials and mixed methods. Catherine currently lead the ERA randomised controlled trial which is comparing group arts therapies to group counselling in community mental health services and lead on the overall intervention development for the CREATE study. 

Dr Jane Bourne 

Jane is an Advanced Clinical Academic Arts Psychotherapist and Dramatherapist, working in a National Health Service Trust in the United kingdom and has an honorary position at Newcastle University. Her career has been supported by the National Institute of Health Research (NIHR) Academy and NIHR funding programmes over the years and her work with Learning Disability populations has supported policy changes. She continues to investigate ways to improve patient care by using creative and accessible interventions.

Dr Val Huet

Val qualified as an Art Therapist in 1986. She later trained as a Group Psychotherapist and Organisational Consultant and completed a PhD on art therapy groups for work-related stress. She is involved currently in several research projects, including a Randomized Control Trial on Arts Therapies Groups for people with mixed diagnoses, a pilot of online art therapy groups for people with chronic pain, and an international arts therapies project on child labour.

Val was the Chief Executive Officer of the British Association of Art Therapists from 2003 to 2021.  She is co-director of the Oxford College of Arts & Therapies, an online training organisation.  She is a Visiting Professor on the MA in Art Therapy at the University of Hertfordshire and on the MSc inArt Psychotherapy at Ulster University. She is the Honorary President of the International Association for Creative Arts in Education and Therapies (IACAET) and a Trustee of the Adamson Collection Trust.

Val works closely with creative health and arts therapies organisations as a freelance researcher and lectures internationally.   She has been a lifelong passionate advocate of art therapy and continues to share her enthusiasm for her profession.

Eleanor Keiller 

Eleanor is a dramatherapist, researcher and lecturer of dramatherapy. She is currently conducting her PhD at Queen Mary University of London, funded by Barts Charity, which explores the active ingredients of school-based dramatherapy for children and young people who are experiencing anxiety, depression and trauma. In recent years, Eleanor has led and supported dramatherapy research projects relating to adults in forensic settings and to people who have psychosis. She is currently the principal investigator of a research grant exploring dramatherapy with migrant and refugee populations. She is also the convenor of the British Association of Dramatherapists Research Subcommittee and her clinical background is in the NHS and education sectors.

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