Consortium Members
The UKPRP VISION consortium on Violence, Health and Society is a multidisciplinary team of researchers and experts, based at City, University of London and with partners at King's College London, University College London, Lancaster University, University of Central Lancashire, University of Bristol, Warwick University, and Public Health Wales. Our work engages with multiple public and Third Sector professionals and practitioners who generate data, as well as with national and international governmental and public bodies that use data.
Director
Professor Gene Feder OBE: Director of the VISION Consortium | Professor of Primary Care at the University of Bristol
Gene is a Professor of Primary Care and leads a research group on healthcare responses to domestic violence and trauma at the University of Bristol. He is co-director of HERA, an NIHR global health group with partners in Brazil, Nepal, occupied Palestinian territories, and Sri Lanka. He has chaired four NICE guideline development groups and led the WHO intimate partner violence guidelines. In 2017 he was awarded an OBE for services to healthcare and victims of domestic abuse.
Gene is one of the senior co-investigators, with a focus on the quality, utility and linkage of routinely collected data within primary, secondary, and mental health care services. His work focuses on using data to evaluate interventions and new programmes on healthcare responses to domestic violence and abuse, and linkages between health care and other sector data, as well as contributions to the Consortium's strategic direction and translation into practice and policy outcomes.
Consortium Leads
Dr Estela Capelas Barbosa: Consortium Deputy Director | Integrated Dataset Lead and Specialised Services thread
Estela is a Senior Research Fellow at the Violence and Society Centre. She is a member of the peer-review panel for the NIHR Health Inequalities Research Initiative and has previously been funded by UKRI ESRC, NIHR and the Department of Health and Social Care. Her expertise is in economics, economic and statistical modelling, with an emphasis on social welfare and health economics.
Sally McManus: Consortium Deputy Director | Mental Health Lead
Sally is a Senior Lecturer in Health at the Violence and Society Centre. She is also affiliated with the National Centre for Social Research and has previously been funded by UKRI ESRC and NIHR. Her expertise in quantitative research methods and the measurement of mental health focuses on population trends and the social determinants of mental health, including the role played by violence and abuse.
Sally is one of the Consortium’s Deputy Directors, providing oversight particularly in relation to measurement and data collection. She also leads the mental health thread of work, including the curation and analyses of mental health survey data.
Professor Brian Francis: Consortium Statistics Lead | Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) and Global Dataset Lead
Brian is a Professor of Social Statistics at the University of Lancaster, with interests in latent class methods for longitudinal data, mixture models and categorical data problems. His research focuses on quantitative criminology, particularly criminal offenders, social and development change, and victimisation studies relating to violence and serious offending, including sexual offending, homicide, organised and cyber-crime.
Brian is part of the senior management team responsible for statistical methods, and is currently coordinating the CSEW thread (integrating numerous sweeps of gender-based victimisation data on violence) and the Global Dataset thread (examining gender-based homicide across countries).
Consortium Management
Kimberly Cullen: Consortium Knowledge Exchange Manager
Kimberly is the Knowledge Exchange Manager for the VISION Consortium. Her role is to optimise the impact of the research to reduce violence by engaging multiple stakeholders, to play a key role in developing and consolidating pathways to impact, and to develop the public engagement of the Consortium’s communications strategy.
Kimberly has worked in the UK, the USA, New Zealand, and the United Arab Emirates in programme, stakeholder, and data management for government and academia.
Consortium Researchers
Professor Mark Bellis: Director of Policy and International Health at Public Health Wales | Police and Health threads
Mark is head of the World Health Organization (WHO) Collaborating Centre on Investment for Health and Well-being at Public Health Wales and Professor of Public Health at Bangor University. Mark has also worked as an advisor to organisations including; United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund. He has published over 200 academic papers and more than 250 applied public health reports and books.
Mark is a senior co-investigator on the VISION project, and is particularly involved in the Police and Health threads. His role in the Consortium includes supporting impact and connections with health, criminal justice and other policy areas, advising national and international networking, including the WHO and other major international bodies, contributing to analytical approaches and publications, and offering expertise on adverse childhood experiences.
Dr Niels Blom: Research Fellow in Criminology at the Violence and Society Centre at City, University of London | Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) and Integrated Data Set threads
Niels is a Research Fellow at the Violence and Society Centre. He has previously worked for the University of Bath and University of Southampton. His expertise in quantitative research methods focuses on family sociology, family demography, economic inequalities, and wellbeing, particularly in the study of partner relationship quality.
Within the Consortium, Niels' research focuses on the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) and the development of an integrated dataset on violence, which combines survey and administrative data to provide a more comprehensive view on violence in society.
Dr Annie Bunce: Research Fellow in Criminology at the Violence and Society Centre at City, University of London | Third Sector Specialised Services thread
Annie is a Research Fellow in Criminology at the Violence and Society Centre where her research focuses on specialised services. Within the Consortium, she will be working with data providers from specialised services to develop the architecture of their administrative datasets, contributing specialised service data and analyses towards the integrated dataset, and provide evaluation of third sector interventions in violence.
Annie was awarded her PhD in Psychology/Criminology from the University of Surrey, which involved a qualitative exploration of prisoners’ motivation to participate in a rehabilitation programme. Annie previously worked as a Research Officer at Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of prisons and for Third Sector organisation in both management and research roles.
Dr Sophie Carlisle: Research Fellow in Evidence Synthesis in Women’s Mental Health at King’s College London | Systematic Reviews thread
Sophie is a Research Fellow in Evidence Synthesis based in the Section of Women’s Mental Health at King’s College London. She is working as a systematic reviewer to design and conduct evidence syntheses on a range of topics across the consortium.
Sophie conducted PhD in Health Psychology at the University of Nottingham, examining the impact of mood on influenza vaccine effectiveness. She previously worked as a researcher, investigating the impact of COVID-19-related isolation on students, and as a Senior Systematic Reviewer at the National Guideline Centre, producing evidence-based guidelines for the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence.
Dr Elizabeth Cook: Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the Violence and Society Centre at City, University of London | Systematic Reviews, Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Homicide threads
Elizabeth is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the Violence and Society Centre. She has previously been employed at the Universities of Oxford, Manchester, and Sheffield, and has been funded by the UKRI ESRC. Her expertise in qualitative research methods focuses on homicide, gender, and family and voluntary sector responses to violence. Elizabeth is a Co-Investigator within the Consortium and is involved in three threads: systematic reviews (on sex/gender-disaggregated homicide); natural language processing; and homicide. In addition, she leads a working group on the epistemological infrastructures of measuring violence.
Dr Jessica Corsi: Law Lecturer at the Violence and Society Centre at City, University of London | Systematic Reviews and Natural Language Processing (NLP) threads
Jessica is a Lecturer in Law at the Violence and Society Centre. She has previously worked for the United Nations and Human Rights Watch. Her expertise spans public international law, regional law, and domestic law, combining traditional legal and social science research methods to understand how the law can prevent and alleviate violence and foster substantive and transformative equality.
Dr Elouise Davies: Research Associate at the University of Lancaster | Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) thread
Elouise is a Research Associate at Lancaster University. She will be working with the Crime Survey for England and Wales data. This includes data cleaning, combining multiple years of data and using quantitative methods to analyse data on violence.
Elouise recently completed her PhD thesis titled: Is Domestic Violence Violent Crime? She has previously used the Crime Survey for England and Wales for her master’s dissertation project, two short research projects and her PhD thesis. Her research interests include gender-based violence, violent crime, threats to kill and quantitative criminology.
Dr Anastasia Fadeeva: Research Fellow in Health Sciences at the Violence and Society Centre at City, University of London | Health thread
Anastasia is a Research Fellow in Health Sciences at the Violence and Society Centre, with research experience in public health, social epidemiology, medicine, and health psychology particularly on health determinants, mental health, and health behaviours. Her doctoral research explored the predictors of positive retirement adjustment, and she previously worked at the Northern Hub for Veterans and Military Families Research at Northumbria University researching physical and mental health in the UK veterans’ cohort.
Within the Consortium, Anastasia works primarily within the Health thread, including exploration of the conceptualization of violence in the health field. She will curate the Public Health Wales (PHW) dataset, which uniquely links health (A&E and ambulance) and justice (police) worlds, and will improve the usability of and analyse data from PHW.
Dr Vanessa Gash: Deputy Head of Sociology at City, University of London | UK Household Longitudinal Study (UKHLS) Lead
Vanessa is an empirical and interdisciplinary social scientist and currently on research leave from her position as Deputy Head of the Department of Sociology, at City University London. She has specialised in comparative labour market research of precarious employment, including gender employment differences and pay gaps, and has expertise in both panel and cross-national data structures.
Vanessa is working on a series of papers that examine the associations between exposure to violence and labour market disadvantage using multiple waves of the United Kingdom Household Longitudinal Data (UKHLS). These papers will look at pay penalties to violence exposure and also the (possible) differential role of violence experience on women and men’s economic positioning.
Dr Ladan Hashemi: Research Fellow in Health Sciences at the Violence and Society Centre at City, University of London | Global Dataset thread
Ladan's research focuses on macro level predictors of fatal violence within the VISION Consortium. She utilises global datasets on homicide ( UNODC and WHO) linked with other global datasets produced by World Bank, Inter-Parliamentary Union, etc., to investigate the relationship between gendered homicide rates and complex inequalities embedded in gender dimensions of country-specific social, economic, and political indicators.
Hashemi previously worked as the lead analyst of the 2019 New Zealand Family Violence Survey and explored the gender patterns in the prevalence of intimate partner violence victimisation and perpetration and investigated the long term impacts of violence exposure. Within the Paediatrics Department, her research focused on social determinants of child health.
Professor Louise Howard: Professor in Women's Mental Health at King's College London | Health thread
Louise is a Professor in Women’s Mental Health at KCL and has worked as an Honorary Consultant Perinatal Psychiatrist at the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust. She is an NIHR Senior Investigator. She is President of the International Marcé (perinatal mental health) Society.
Louise will provide input on clinical and policy implications of research carried out within The Consortium.
Dr Leslie Humphreys: Senior Lecturer in Criminal Justice and Policing at the University of Central Lancashire | Police thread
Les is a Senior Lecturer in Criminal Justice and Policing and Deputy Lead of the Policing Strand of the Criminal Justice Partnership at the University of Central Lancashire's School of Justice. He was previously a Lecturer in Quantitative Criminology at the Law School for Lancaster University and has worked with Lancashire Constabulary in providing expertise on police data. His research focuses included domestic abuse, violence, gender, policing, sentencing, and the application of quantitative methods in criminal justice research.
Dr Alexandria Innes: Senior Lecturer in International Politics at the Violence and Society Centre at City, University of London | Systematic Reviews and Natural Language Processing (NLP) threads
Alexandria is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the Violence and Society Centre. Her research is situated at the intersection of critical security studies and migration studies. Previously, she convened the East of England Migration Research Network at the University of East Anglia, was CI on an ESRC grant ‘Transnational Organized Crime and Translation’, and is the author of two monographs on migration and citizenship.
Alexandria' main research focus is in international politics, insecurity and migration. Within the VISION Consortium she will be working on the Systematic Reviews thread looking into prevalence of violence experienced by people in insecure migration status. She will also look at data pertaining to violence and minoritized identities, using Natural Language Processing, and will develop some theoretical work with a focus on epistemology and hierarchies of knowledge.
Dr Natalia Lewis: Research Fellow in Primary Care at the University of Bristol | Systematic Reviews Lead and Evaluation thread
Natalia is a mixed-methods researcher with a clinical background, PhD in health psychology, and specialism in health systems response to violence and trauma. She belongs to the Domestic Violence Abuse and Health Group at the Centre for Academic Primary Care, University of Bristol.
Natalia leads the Systematic Review thread, providing leadership, expert advice on systematic review methods, and managing problems and progress. She is also a co-investigator on work package 5 'Evaluation of the cost-effectiveness of interventions', which will pilot an observational study testing user-prioritised interventions' acceptability and ability to provide data for cost-effectiveness models.
Dr Lifang Li : Research Associate at King's College London | Natural Language Processing (NLP) thread
Lifang is a Research Associate in Health Text Analytics and Data Science in the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, King’s College London. Lifang received her Ph.Ds. from City University of Hong Kong and Xi’an Jiaotong University and previously worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the South China University of Technology. Her expertise is in data science, text mining, and network analytics, with a focus on public health, crisis management, and gender inequality.
Within the VISION Consortium, Lifang's research focuses on applying natural language processing techniques to extract various types of violence using CRIS data and to conduct new applications.
Hannah Manzur: PhD Student and Research Assistant at the Violence and Society Centre at City, University of London | Systematic Reviews and Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) threads
Hannah is a Sociology PhD student researching the impact of Brexit on gendered violence, focusing particularly on borders, intersecting inequalities, law and policy change, and their relation to gendered violence and inequalities. Alongside her studies, Hannah provides admin and comms support for the Consortium and works on the CSEW and Systematic Review threads. She previously worked as a Gender Policy Advisor at the European Parliament during Brexit.
Dr Polina Obolenskaya: Research Fellow in Sociology at the Violence and Society Centre at City, University of London | Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) thread
Polina is a Research Fellow in Sociology at the Violence and Society Centre. She previously worked at the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion (LSE) and her research to date has focused predominantly on disadvantage and social and economic inequalities, utilizing a range of national surveys, administrative and linked datasets.
Within the Consortium, Polina is working on the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) with the aims to improve our understanding of violence and its measurement; to better understand the relationship between violence and health; and to prepare the CSEW for the integration with other datasets.
Dr Sian Oram: Head of the Section of Women’s Mental Health and Senior Lecturer at King's College London | Systematic Reviews thread
Sian is Head of the Section of Women’s Mental Health and Senior Lecturer in Women's Mental Health at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience at King's College London. Her research focuses on interpersonal trauma, its intersection with gender and with institutional and societal structures, and its relationship to mental health. She has an interest in developing methods for safe, ethical, and participatory research with and by people affected by trauma and abuse, and has expertise in qualitative methods, systematic reviews, and evaluation research. Sian is currently on maternity leave.
Dr Angus Roberts: Senior Lecturer in Health Informatics at King's College London | Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Health threads
Angus is a computer scientist with a research interest in applying natural language processing and artificial intelligence to extract information from text, for use in health and social science research. His background is in NHS laboratory sciences and NHS software development, before becoming interested in medical terminology and knowledge representation, and the reuse of electronic health records.
Within the Consortium, Angus is working on natural language processing of text records being analysed by the consortium, extracting information to use in the project's violence measurement framework. He will be exploring how to extend and adapt his existing work on extracting information on violence from text in mental health records from other text types within the Consortium.
Professor Debra Salmon: Dean, School of Health Sciences at City, University of London | Health thread
Debra, Dean of City's School of Health Sciences, joined City, University of London in September 2015. Debra is Professor of Community Health. Her research is focused on community health, the needs of ‘hard to reach groups’ and service improvement; her early academic career focused on domestic abuse in the antenatal period and the role of midwives in antenatal screening.
Debra brings expertise to the consortium in health and health services research, advising on the scoping of community and health interventions in relation to violence, in particular domestic violence, and awareness of wider healthcare workforce issues.
Professor Robert Stewart: Professor of Psychiatric Epidemiology and Clinical Informatics at King’s College London | Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Health threads
Robert has been Academic Lead for the Clinical Record Interactive Search (CRIS) data resource at the South London and Maudsley Biomedical Research Centre since its development in 2007/8. CRIS is a ground-breaking platform enabling research access to deidentified mental healthcare records within a robust governance framework, and has supported over 250 publications.
Robert will oversee the development of mechanisms for ascertaining violence from routine healthcare records within the VISION Consortium through its NLP and Health threads, as well as advising on the use of routine data resources for VISION’s aims and on mental health measures in particular.
Dr Leonie Tanczer: Lecturer in International Security and Emerging Technologies at University College London | Tech Abuse Lead
Leonie is the "Gender and Internet of Things (IoT)" programme lead at UCL, a member of the "Violence, Abuse and Mental Health: Opportunities for Change" (VAMHN) Consortium, part of the Advisory Council of the Open Rights Group (ORG), and Principal Investigator of the “First RespondXR" project. Prior to her lectureship appointment, Leonie was a Postdoctoral Research Associate for the EPSRC-funded PETRAS Internet of Things (IoT) Research Hub.
Leonie is a Lecturer in International Security and Emerging Technologies at University College London’s Department of Science, Technology, Engineering and Public Policy (STEaPP). Her research focuses on the intersection points of technology, security, and gender. Within the consortium, she will be working on conceptualising and measuring newly identified forms of violence, such as technology-facilitated abuse in the context of intimate partner violence.
Professor Ravi Thiara: Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick | Ethnicity and Minoritisation Lead
Ravi is Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick and was previously Director of the Centre for the Study of Safety and Well-being, a dedicated research centre of violence against women and children, at the university. She is a member of the ‘Violence, Abuse and Mental Health: Opportunities for Change’ (VAMHN) consortium. Having worked in this field for almost 30 years, her work focuses on gender, violence and marginality (ethnicity and disability), incorporating a programme of research that has generated new understanding and contributed to significant changes in policy and practice.
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Dr Ruth Weir : Research Fellow at the Violence and Society Centre at City, University of London | Police thread
Ruth is a Senior Research Fellow in Criminology at the Violence and Society Centre. She will be working on the Criminal Justice Strand, using quantitative methods and natural language processing to curate and analyse police data. She will also be working across the threads on small area datasets.
Ruth has expertise in working with police data and Geographic Information Systems. She previously worked as a Research Fellow and Lecturer in Sociology and Criminology at the University of Essex. Prior to academia, Ruth held several research, intelligence and policy positions in local government and for the Home Office.