School of Psychology
Coleraine campus,
Cromore Road,
Coleraine,
Co. Londonderry,
BT52 1SA,
Professor Karen Kirby
Overview
Professor Karen Kirby
PhD, MSc, BSc, C.Psychol, FBPsS, SFHEA
Professor Karen Kirby has been employed by Ulster University since 2004, progressing from Lecturer to Senior Lecturer (2015), and is now a Professor of Psychology (Mental Health & Psychological Therapies), since April 2025. Her academic career is underpinned by extensive prior clinical experience across Clinical Health Psychology, CAMHS and Paediatric Psychology, and a sustained research profile in child and adolescent mental health, trauma, and prevention science.
Professor Kirby is a Fellow of the British Psychological Society (2021), Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (2016), a Chartered Practitioner Psychologist (BPS), and a Registered Counselling and Health Psychologist with the HCPC. She is additionally trained in CBT, Schema Therapy, and Family Therapy.
Teaching Focus
Professor Kirby’s teaching aligns closely with her research expertise in applied psychology, mental health and psychological therapies. At postgraduate level, she coordinates PSY722 Developmental and Mental Health Issues Across the Lifespan and contributes to PSY866 Assessment, Formulation and Intervention Using CBT, and PSY848 Psychological Therapies for Children and Families. She also contributes to the undergraduate final-year module Applied Psychology: Mental Health Practice.
She is Programme Lead for the Clinical Associate Psychology – Children and Young People pathway with the MSc Applied Psychology programme, which supports graduates towards BPS CAP qualification. Professor Kirby also led the original design and BPS accreditation of the Psychological Wellbeing Practitioner (PWP) training route. She continues to provide academic leadership for both professionally accredited pathways.
Research Focus
Professor Kirby is a full member of the Psychology Research Institute and contributes to the Psychology, Psychiatry and Neuroscience UOA at Ulster University. She is also a member of the Mental Health Recognised Research Group (RRG) and the Children and Young People in Schools RRG.
Her research specialises in:
- Child and adolescent mental health
- Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) & Developmental trauma
- Self-harm and suicide prevention in youth
- Trauma-informed systems and whole-organisation approaches
- Applications of the science of hope (Hopeful Minds and Journey’s in Hope for children, youth, parents in local communities)
- Perinatal mental health (parental & birth trauma, early maladaptive schema activation, and consequential maladaptive coping across infant stages of development)
- Preventative, school-based and community interventions
Professor Kirby has published approximately 100 peer-reviewed outputs (journal articles and conference proceedings). Her work includes influential studies on self-harm prevalence and predictors, emotional dysregulation, hope and coping in school settings, and the evaluation of the first trauma-informed compassionate schools programme in Northern Ireland.
Her current research examines the development of early maladaptive schemas and coping modes, with a specific focus on perinatal prevention and parental intervention.
Research Income and Grant Awards
Within the last five years, Professor Kirby has been associated with £1.625m in competitive research funding.
She is a key investigator on two major PEACE PLUS IV awards:
- Our Generation: Making Our Future Better Together (£595k; 2020–2023), a large-scale cross-border preventative mental health programme involving over 3,000 children, demonstrating significant improvements in mental health, coping and intergroup trust.
- Our Generation 2 (£950k; 2024–2027), extending the model to children aged 8–16, with enhanced focus on diversity, intergroup relations, hope and trauma-informed delivery.
Professor Kirby also served as Chief Investigator on the Global Challenge Research Fund project Hopeful Minds in Malaysia (£37k), leading to national curriculum adoption in Sarawak following peer-reviewed evaluation (Raudzah, Kirby et al., 2022).
She is currently Co-Investigator on the Safe Staffing in Social Work in Northern Ireland study (£78k; Dept. of Health NI), which directly informed policy and legislative change on caseload thresholds in children’s and older adult services. See papers in PURE x 6.
Recognition and Esteem
Professor Kirby and colleagues were awarded Ulster University’s Outstanding Interdisciplinary Research Team of the Year (2024) for the Our Generation programme, recognising sustained interdisciplinary research combining psychology, mental health sciences and digital innovation.
Current and Recent Research Leadership
Professor Kirby is Chief Investigator on “An Earthquake in Slow Motion”: The Societal and Family Impact of the Defective Concrete Crisis in Ireland, funded through a DEL PhD scholarship (2023–2027). This work has attracted national media attention and informs public discourse on housing-related toxic stress. Prof Kirby was invited as a keynote speaker to an international conference held ATU in November 2022, titled 'The Science and Societal Impacts of Defective Concrete (DC).
Prof. Kirby’s presentation regarding the mental health impact of DC issue gained significant media attention (several post conference radio interviews, newspapers reporting DC linked to chronic toxic stress). See several Media reports/links in Pure.
Research Supervision
Professor Kirby has supervised 11 funded PhD scholarships since 2012, with a strong completion record.
Recently Completed PhDs
Gillen; McDevitt-Petrovic; McGlinchey; McCallion; MacLochlainn (Lead Supervisor)
Alamoush; Hegarty (Co-Supervisor)
Current PhD Supervision
- Oisin Keenan (CI; housing-related trauma)
- Mary McGinley (perinatal schema development)
- Oisin Harkin (digital CBT interfaces)
- Dylan Sloan (school social work and wellbeing)
Innovation and Knowledge Exchange
Professor Kirby has generated £300,995k in innovation income across seven major interdisciplinary projects, including:
- Digital social prescribing platforms
- Perinatal mental health technologies
- Suicide prevention and trauma-informed school models, daily mindfulness (Schools for Hope Model and Hub’ project in Dunagannon -£20,000),
- Domestic violence emergency reporting technologies (Innovate UK funded 'Digital 999' app (£99,990), enabling women/children to report domestic violence in urgent situations. Developed in collaboration with TapSOS and PSNI).
- Bibliotherapy chatbots for children:
Several initiatives have resulted in commercial scale-up, job creation, policy influence, and national adoption.
Community and Societal Impact
Professor Karen Kirby has an established track record of high-impact, community-engaged research that has demonstrably influenced policy, practice, education, and public understanding in the areas of youth mental health, suicide prevention, trauma, and community adversity. Her work is characterised by sustained partnerships with health and social care services, schools, local authorities, third-sector organisations, businesses, and communities, both locally and internationally, often in response to acute community crises.
A central strand of Professor Kirby’s impact activity concerns the prevention of youth self-harm and suicide through early, school-based mental health literacy and coping-skills education, informed directly by her empirical research.
Youth Self-Harm and Suicide Prevention
Professor Kirby was Chief Investigator on a programme of four large-scale empirical studies examining the predictors of self-harm behaviours and poor mental health in almost 1,800 young people aged 11–18 years attending schools in Northern Ireland (see PURE outputs: Gillen, Kirby et al., 2015/2020; McGlinchey, Kirby et al., 2018/2021).
These studies identified emotional dysregulation, hopelessness, and maladaptive coping as key risk mechanisms and provided a robust evidence base for preventative, curriculum-embedded interventions. The findings directly informed recommendations to educate children about:
- The neuroscience of stress and the developing brain
- Emotional regulation skills
- Problem-solving and adaptive coping strategies
Professor Kirby has since led the translation of this evidence into practice, dedicating several years to transforming mental health literacy provision in schools across Northern Ireland and internationally, with the explicit aim of reducing maladaptive coping and self-harm risk in young people.
Development and Evaluation of a School-Based Prevention Programme
In response to these findings, Professor Kirby contributed to the design and evaluation of a novel, whole-school suicide-prevention programme, developed in collaboration with international academic partners from Harvard University (Professor Myron Belfer and Dr Kristin Stark), Kathryn Goetske (founder of Hopeful Minds), and implemented in Northern Ireland by Marie Dunne, Director of Resilio.
The curriculum is scientifically grounded in Hope Theory (Snyder, 2018), targeting hopelessness as a key antecedent of poor mental health and wellbeing, academic achievement and youth self-harm. The programme was empirically evaluated (Kirby et al., 2021/2022; PURE) and disseminated through:
- The 2019 Northern Ireland British Psychological Society Symposium
- The 9th International Conference on Child and Adolescent Mental Health (Malaysia)
Professor Kirby is also a new member of INCORE, and her work on supporting the development of a ‘Community of Hope’ in DLD and Northern Ireland with the Pro Vice Chancellor Professor Paul Connolly will become a key feature of her work going forward.
Policy, Education and Workforce Impact
Prior to large-scale rollout, Professor Kirby chaired the 2017 conference “Building Resilience for Children and Young People in Northern Ireland” at Ulster University’s Derry/Londonderry campus. Keynote speakers included Professor Belfer, Dr Stark, Kathryn Goetske, and Marie Dunne, with attendance from CAMHS, the Education Authority, the Department of Health, school principals, and the Northern Ireland Commissioner for Children and Young People.
This event acted as a catalyst for system-level change, supporting teacher training and the subsequent integration of Hopeful Minds into school curricula.
International Reach and Impact
Through a Global Challenge Research Fund award (£37k), Professor Kirby extended this work internationally via “Bringing Hopeful Minds to the Children of Malaysia”, in collaboration with US partners and Professor Ghazali (University of Sarawak). Following peer-reviewed evaluation (Ghazali, Kirby et al., 2022), the programme was adopted in hundreds of Malaysian schools, demonstrating significant international reach and cultural transferability.
Practitioner and Community Testimony
Qualitative feedback from educators highlights the practical value of the intervention:
“The Hopeful Minds programme has helped children understand the importance of maintaining hope during difficult times, the neurobiology of stress, how to regulate emotions, where to seek help, and how to problem-solve. These are invaluable, evidence-based coping skills to instil early in life.”
To date, several hundred teachers have been trained in the Hopeful Minds programme.
Sustained Public Engagement and Knowledge Exchange
Professor Kirby has sustained and expanded the public impact of this work through:
- The Derry & Strabane District Council ‘Festival of Hope Day’, addressing post-COVID community hopelessness
- The ‘Campus of Hope’ exhibition at Ulster University (April 2024), engaging staff and students
- A live audience interview and BBC podcast with Claudia Hammond (All in the Mind: The Psychology of Hope, BBC Science Festival, March 2024), translating research on hope and suicide prevention to a national and international audience
Leadership, Service and Professional Roles
Professor Kirby is:
- Co-Chair, Faculty Wellbeing, Resilience and Belonging Working Group
- Postgraduate Placement Coordinator, CAP (Children & Young People)
- Member, BPS Division of Counselling Psychology
- Member, GTi-CAP Training Committee (UK-wide)
- Member, Psychology Professions Workforce Consortium (NI)
