Congratulations to Janine Geddis, who has won a NI Department for the Economy award to support her doctoral research, which commenced in October that combines law and psychology.

Janine Geddis won a doctoral scholarship from the Northern Ireland Department for the Economy, and in October 2022, she started a doctorate that combines law and psychology. This interdisciplinary project focuses on the mental health and wellbeing of human rights defenders, and explores how the right to health within international human rights law can provide better protections for the mental health of human rights defenders. The research aims to address attitudes to mental health among human rights defenders, the extent of mental health difficulties among a sample population of human rights defenders, the role (if any) that workplace culture plays in mental health difficulties, and models of successful support modelled by other professions with similar demands.

Janine will be supervised by Professor Louise Mallinder and Dr Clare Patton from the School of Law, and Dr Donncha Hanna from the School of Psychology. 

Janine stated “Human rights defenders face great emotional demands as they try their utmost to ensure people everywhere have their human rights respected. I hope this research will shine a light on the fact that they deserve the same, and go some way towards highlighting ways of making that possible.” 

Professor Louise Mallinder said, “Janine’s research addresses a highly important, but previously under-researched question and it has the potential to yield results that will be of great value to the field of human rights practice”.

We welcome PhD applications from prospective students. Further details on how to apply can be found at https://www.qub.ac.uk/schools/SchoolofLaw/study/postgraduate-research/