The funding is part of an overall €3.3 million award made by the European Commission's Horizon 2020 scheme to a number of academics and practitioners from world-leading international research centres.
The four-year CONTEXT (Collaborative Network for Training and Excellence in Psychotramatology) project will be led by Trinity College Dublin in collaboration with Ulster University, the University of Southern Denmark, the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre, SPIRASI, the Probation Board of Northern Ireland (PBNI), the Danish Red Cross-Psychosocial Support Centre, and the Bornehus South Children's Centre.
Twelve doctoral researchers will study the psychological effects of exposure to traumatic life events amongst groups including refugees, asylum seekers and migrants who have entered Europe from conflict zones. Also included will be humanitarian workers tasked with providing aid to traumatised individuals, and victims of gender-based and childhood traumas.
The researchers will also spend half of their training with the non-academic partner organisations gaining front-line experience working with victims of traumatic experience.
Leading the project from Ulster University are Professor Mark Shevlin, Dr Jamie Murphy, and Dr Cherie Armour.
Ulster University's Dr Jamie Murphy said: "This doctoral training programme will offer successful applicants a PhD experience like no other. The proposed academic institution partnerships, the selection of and alignment with non-academic partners and the overall programme of research have been carefully selected, formulated and designed to ensure that each trainee directly tackles the context based complexity of psychotraumatology within a distinct trauma context and among distinct trauma populations."