Dr Katie Shearn has just taken up an appointment as a postdoctoral research fellow in health and social care. She is based in the Department of Nursing and Midwifery within the research programme led by Professor Laura Serrant. This year long post-doctoral position was created as part of the recent changes in the organisation of health and social care research in the Faculty of Health and Wellbeing. It provides opportunity for Katie to disseminate the findings from her thesis and take her own research forward as well as contributing to the research support team which is being developed by Professor Davina Porock.
Katie joined SHU in 2014 when she was awarded a full-time faculty PhD scholarship.
Katie’s supervisory team was made up of Dr Hilary Piercy as Director of Studies, Dr Peter Allmark and Professor Julia Hirst (from D&S). Katie says;
“I returned to academia, after a successful contract research career, wanting to deepen my understanding of an important topic of youth sexual health and develop my academic research skills. My experience at SHU has surpassed my expectations. I have benefitted from a fantastic, cross-faculty, supervisory team, who stretched and challenged me. Through my research I have also had the opportunity to connect with a wide range of people who have helped me identify where my work can have the greatest impact.”
Katie made a valuable contribution to the Faculty when she was a doctoral student. In her capacity as student representative for health and social care which she held for eighteen months, she was involved in a number of initiatives designed to foster the research environment. These included organising two student symposia which provided doctoral students and established academics the opportunity to network and hear about the ground-breaking research being undertaken within the doctoral programme.
Dr Katie Shearn completed her doctoral studies in February 2018 and was awarded her PhD with no amendments – a rare achievement indeed. The examiners commented on the excellence of her written work and her performance in the viva which clearly demonstrated her mastery of the topic area. Her thesis ‘Delivering positive youth sexual health services; a realist evaluation’ makes substantial contributions to methodological development of realist approaches and to the area of youth sexual health services and is already impacting in both areas. She has published two methodological papers in high quality international journals, one of which was downloaded over 500 times in the week after publication, and she is engaged in disseminating the substantive findings at a national level including Public Health England.
