Research Community

Chris is a social worker lecturer and Army Veteran, whose research interests span her social work and Veteran identity. She is a member of the Northern Hub for Veterans and Military Families Research and has completed a PhD study, which explores the life stories of women Veterans who served between the 1940s to 2000s. Her military-focused research interests are military women, Veterans, LGBT+ and social work research linked to developing simulation pedagogies for pre and post-qualifying social workers.

Dean Whybrow’s research area is organizational health and well-being. He is a subject matter expert in well-being and occupational mental health care. This includes developing resources to cope with job demands such as high workload, ethical dilemmas, or exposure to potentially traumatic events. He is focused on the interplay between job demands and job resources, and strategies for promoting employee resilience. On the flip side are employee burnout, disengagement, and workforce attrition. These factors are especially relevant to healthcare workforces where staff recruitment, education, and retention can impact service delivery. His emphasis is promoting recovery and well-being, understanding the decision to leave a job, the experience of career change and identifying opportunities to promote employee engagement and retention. 

Dr Emma Senior is an Assistant Professor in Nursing and Specialist Community Public Health Nursing, alongside being a Veteran spouse. As a member of the Northern Hub for Veterans & Military Families' Research, Dr Emma Senior completed her PhD exploring the experiences of military spouses who have lived alongside their UK serving partner with a mental health issue. Her military focused research interests seek to explore the qualitative experiences of military spouses/relationships, mental health, and well-being to inform mechanisms for support and CPD opportunities within health and social care. 

Dr Faye Acton is Research Fellow and the lead for military connected children and young people in the Veterans and Families Institute for Military and Social Research (VFI) at Anglia Ruskin University. As a qualitative researcher her work is focused on developing practice-based evidence with the voices and lived experiences of children and young people at the core of her work. She is particularly interested in developing the concept of identity and understanding military connected children and young people’s lives more comprehensively, including school and educational experiences. Faye has both academic and professional experience of working with both children and young people and professionals to inform and enhance policy and practice.

Faye joined Anglia Ruskin University in 2016 as a researcher following a professional practice-based career in health and education. Faye worked as a Health Improvement Practitioner in the NHS with primary and secondary schools to develop, deliver and evaluate health and wellbeing interventions and programmes of support for children and young people. She subsequently qualified as a primary school teacher, where she worked as a classroom teacher, PSHE lead, and gained the national award for Special Educational Needs Coordination to work as an Inclusion Manager.

Dr Georgina Normile is a researcher from Bath Spa University whose interests focus on the well-being of early-years Service children during a deployment-related parental separation. Her PhD research was entitled ‘A case study exploring the impact of parental deployment on the well-being of British Army children in the pre-school year’. Georgina is passionate about representing a range of perspectives within her research, including those of young children themselves. A key aim of her research is to highlight how the nebulous term ‘well-being’ can be understood and operationalised to better inform educational and Armed Forces policy and practice for young Service children.

Howard received his PhD in epidemiology for research on mental health and socioeconomic status of UK Armed Forces personnel transitioning to civilian life. Veterans and transition remain his primary areas of interest, including mental health, social, and economic outcomes. His experience is in mixed-methods research, including cross-sectional studies, longitudinal studies, randomised controlled trials, meta-analysis, and data linkage. He has published on the long-term mental health and socioeconomic outcomes of Veterans, as well as other areas of Armed Forces well-being and return from deployment. His current main study is ADVANCE-INVEST, on the consequences of battlefield injury to the transition outcomes of Veterans.