Professor Karen Devries
BSc PhD
Professor
of Social Epidemiology
I am a social epidemiologist with expertise in the prevention of violence against children and adolescents, and child protection. I lead the Child Protection Research Group and am affiliated with the Gender, Violence and Health Centre, the Centre for Evidence in Disability, the Centre for Evaluation, the Centre for Global Mental Health, and MARCH.
Affiliations
Centres
Teaching
I supervise MSc and PhD students; co-organise the Social Epidemiology Module; co-organise the short course Researching Gender-Based Violence: Methods and Meaning; and lecture on a number of different MSc modules. I'm currently the Deputy Research Degrees Coordinator for the Department of Global Health and Development.
Research
My main research interests include: understanding the causes and consequences of violence against children and adolescents; understanding how resilience to adverse experiences is produced; and developing and testing interventions to reduce violence and other adverse experiences in childhood. I also conduct research on violence against women, sexual health, mental health, disability, and epidemiological methods.
My main research collaborations are currently in Uganda, Tanzania, Zimbabwe and Cote d’Ivoire, and my work is funded primarily by the UK Research Councils. I'm a member of the academic technical advisory board for the International Violence Against Children Surveys, and advise WHO on measurement of violence against women.
For a recent article in the popular press on violence and COVID-19, click here: https://www.thinkglobalhealth.org/article/violence-times-coronavirus-ugly-truth
and for some helpful recent blogs by colleagues on violence data collection during COVID-19: