Research Community

Dr David Jackson is a disabled Royal Marine Veteran and an honorary Research Fellow at the University of Exeter. He is currently working on The Military Afterlives Project and the Stories in Transition Project. His research interests include engagement and involvement of the ex-Service personnel community and their families within the research process, particularly through participatory and co-research methods. He is interested in moving away from mono modal outputs and moving towards creative research methods which can lead to a different understanding of Veterans and their families.

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 Ed Bryan is an Analyst and the Supporting Lead of the Defence Workforce and Armed Forces Community research portfolio at RAND Europe. His research interests include defence workforce trends, Armed Forces cultures and discourse, as well as areas of systematic disadvantage and vulnerability amongst military populations. Ed holds a PhD, MPhil, and BA in Geopolitics and Political Geography from the University of Cambridge and previously served as an anti-corruption intelligence researcher for UK police forces in the Eastern Region.

Dr Ellen McHugh is Senior Lecturer in Education in the Department of Education, Brunel University London. Ellen’s research interests focus on education and student experience; higher education and widening participation; transnationalism and belonging.

Dr Elliott Atkinson is a neuromuscular physiologist whose interests primarily lie in the underpinning neural mechanisms of human motor function. His focus is to investigate how the human neural system adapts to resistance training and pathophysiological conditions, and the influence of sex and hormonal status. He aims to combine these focuses to understand better the neural mechanisms and impact of hormonal status in both healthy and clinical groups, and how resistance training might be better tailored to provide improved quality of life outcomes. 

Dr Emma Murray is an Associate Professor in Criminal and Social Justice at the Centre of Excellence for Equities in Uniformed Public Services (CEEUPS) at Anglia Ruskin University, and Criminologist in Residence at the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology (FACT), Liverpool. Emma is particularly interested in the lived experiences of Veterans who have been convicted of serious violence or sexual offences. Her research is committed to engaged scholarship that informs justice sector policy and serves as a catalyst for change for the benefit of the Armed Forces as a whole. Emma's work promotes narrative, visual and creative qualitative methodologies that are trauma-informed and inclusive to challenge biases. Emma has acted as a research partner for FACT (2014-ongoing),  The Howard League for Penal Reform (2015-ongoing), The Royal British Legion (2017-2018), and The Probation Institute (2018-ongoing).