Dr. Emma Nolan is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the School of Psychology at Queen’s University Belfast. Before joining Queen’s, Emma earned her undergraduate degree in Psychology from Ulster University. She then completed her PhD in Psychology and Mental Health at Ulster University (2021). Her doctoral research focused on understanding the development of psychotic like experiences and psychosis.

After her PhD Emma worked as Research Associate and Data Analyst on The Northern Ireland Youth Well-Being Survey (NIYWBS). This was the first nationally representative survey of child and youth mental health in Northern Ireland.  In 2022 Emma moved to Canada where she held a research fellowship in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Neurosciences, at McMaster University, and The Offord Centre for Child Studies on the Advancing Youth Mental Health team. In this role, Emma worked on the Longitudinal Canadian Health Survey on Children and Youth (L-CHSCY), the first Nationally representative survey of child and youth health in Canada that spanned pre-and post-pandemic. She worked on developing, implementing, and analyses of the L-CHSCY. Her work also focused on strengthening partnerships, integrating knowledge translation strategies, and ensuring the survey’s findings are positioned to inform policy and practice at national and international levels.

Emma’s research integrates rigorous psychometric analysis with the epidemiology of youth mental health and well-being, examining how social, environmental, and systemic factors shape outcomes across populations. A key aspect of her work is the psychometric validation of mental health assessment tools in youth, ensuring that measures used in research and clinical practice are robust, reliable, and accurately capture the complexities of youth mental health and well-being. By strengthening the precision and applicability of these tools, she contributes to more accurate prevalence estimates, improved screening and diagnosis, and the development of targeted interventions. She is particularly interested in how cross-national collaborations, comparable data, and evidence-based policy development can drive meaningful change in these areas. Her work in psychiatric epidemiology not only identifies key mental health and well-being trends but also focuses on translating research into actionable policy and practice, ensuring a lasting impact at both national and international levels.

Research Interests
Emma's research centres on exploring child and adolescent psychopathology and wellbeing as distinct constructs, and exploring how mental health and well-being are influenced by family, community, and systemic factors. She is particularly focused on the development and validation of mental health assessment tools for children and youth, aiming to enhance their accuracy and applicability. Emma's recent work in Canada is rooted in psychiatric epidemiology, where she focuses on understanding the correlates of child and adolescent psychopathology and well-being cross-sectionally and longitudinally; the impact of events such as the COVID-19 pandemic on mental health; and ultimately using this research to provide information that will support evidenced-based policy, future preparedness and program development.

Emma is particularly interested in the association between adverse childhood experiences, trauma — including experiences of bereavement  from loss or family separation—and how these impact the development of mental health problems. She also focuses on resilience and well-being in response to these experiences, and explores factors that promote positive health outcomes. Additionally, Emma examines how these experiences influence overall functioning and contribute to the dimensional structure of psychopathology. She works closely with international organizations such as Statistics Canada, McMaster University and UNICEF to advance our understanding of psychiatric epidemiology in children and youth by developing rigorous, comparable data, and working to ensure our research is directly informs youth mental health policies for both nationally and internationally.

Currently Emma is leading a funded national research project “Understanding and Promoting Well-Being in Youth” that is focused on understanding the conceptualization, associations and predictors of well-being across the life-span. This work is contributing to UNICEFs Global Report Card on child and youth well-being.

Teaching
Dr. Emma Nolan has taught modules in developmental psychology, mental health, research methods, psychiatric epidemiology and clinical health at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels. She is an active supervisor for undergraduate and postgraduate students. Emma brings her passion for mental health and well-being into her teaching, emphasizing evidence-based approaches and real-world applications of psychological theory and research.