CHAMPIONS PROJECT
Children in Homeless Accommodations Managing Pandemic Invisibility Or Non-inclusive Strategies
Meet The Team
Professor Monica Lakhanpaul
Professor Monica Lakhanpaul is Professor of Integrated Community Child Health at
UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health, Consultant Paediatrician.
She has extensive experience of leading multidisciplinary research teams to tackle some of the most pressing issues facing marginalized, minority and vulnerable families globally through participatory research, citizen science and multisector approaches, ensuring that communities are involved in co- developing holistic integrated solutions for the health and wellbeing challenges they face.
She works across the translation pathway from intervention design to implementation; integrating health, education, environment, engineering and the creative arts to address issues such as childhood nutrition, infection, growth and development and mental health, in the UK and low- and middle-income countries.
She was the first Clinical Director of the Collaborating Centre for Women and Children’s Health, developing guidelines for NICE, is Pro-Vice-Provost for South Asia at UCL, is co-director of the Childhood Infections and Pollution (CHIP) consortium and holds many board and advisory positions for local and national government bodies.
Dr Nadia Svirydzenka
Dr Nadia Svirydzenka is a social and cultural psychologist at De Montfort University, Leicester.
Her research interests lie in understanding mental health of vulnerable populations though culturally framed identities, attitudes, stigma, and behaviours. As culture reflects sociocultural and economic factors underpinning power dynamics in any given society, in her research she uses critical research paradigms employing mixed methods and inclusive participatory methodologies to explore how resilience can be developed in response to social challenges like migration, homelessness, conflict, and gender violence; what factors mitigate the adverse mental health consequences; and how they can be mobilised from within communities for effective interventions.
She believes in challenging traditional separation of meaningful identities like gender, ethnicity, and migrant in favour of an identity intersectionality approach to understanding socio-cultural complexities.
Dr Carmen Caruso
Carmen Caruso (BA, MA, PhD) is trained as a social scientist.
Her work lies at the interface of social and political studies and reflects her interests in migration/mobility and citizenship, diversity and social change.
Her research draws expressively from transnational feminist and postcolonial critique. Most of her activities are shaped by a concern for structural asymmetries in different social and cultural contexts and throughout the years she has participated in different capacities in public engagement projects with several grassroots organisations, in London as well as abroad.
She has published two books, contributed book chapters and authored articles for academic journals.
Dr Joe Williams
Joe is a Research Fellow with the Child Voice Project with De Montfort University. He holds of PhD in Sociology and his research experience has explored work cultures and practices of service providers for those experiencing homelessness, public health initiatives in deprived areas, and the operationalizing of notions of need through service provision.
He has adopted ethnographic methods to do this, joining with service providers and those experiencing homelessness in their daily lives to understand the practical troubles, and reasoning, of informants.
