Trinity Centre for the Developing Person

Mission

The core mission of this innovative interdisciplinary research centre is to bring together complementary perspectives that help advance understanding of the developing person across their lifespan. We focus on questions and topics that range from early influences on child development, family relationship dynamics, adverse life experiences and health related outcomes, risk and resilience processes across development, enhancing learning strengths and supporting developmental transitions among individuals and groups with complex needs, promoting effective psychological interventions across the lifespan, engaging new technologies to enhance healthy development, and promoting effective communication of research to enhance policy and practice innovations to support positive health over the course of development.

We engage state of the art research strategies and methods with a communities of practice approach to promote lived experience infusion across all aspects of our research, dissemination, practice and impact objectives. A core focus of the Centre is to engage and partner with community professionals/practitioners, service providers, family, education and other professional practice and advocacy agencies, as well as parents/carers, children, families, educators and policy makers (nationally and internationally) to help shape and share the Centre’s research activities, objectives, outputs and impacts. While the Centre has at its core a research and practice focus, it has a bottom-line policy and community engagement purpose to its outputs.

Aims and objectives of the Centre

The Centre will be dedicated to conducting research and advancing knowledge relating to optimising psychological health and human development across the lifespan.
The Centre will engage and partner with communities to inform policy and practice which seek to promote healthy development and psychological wellbeing.
Through applying, translating and disseminating our research into usable knowledge in collaboration with policy-makers and practitioners, the Centre will drive innovation, foster collaboration, and deliver social benefit to a diverse range of populations.
The Centre will build capacity through education, mentorship and the delivery of scientist-practitioner training, to inspire and train the next generation of scientists and clinicians.
Through its work, the Centre will demonstrate its commitment to high ethical standards and to championing diversity, equality and inclusion.

Organising Themes

Current research has been organised into three pillars, around which the activities of the Centre will be built.

Unpacking the Building Blocks for Healthy Development – projects in this theme seek to understand factors underlying psychological, social and cognitive health, such as our work on parenting, family, and peer relationships, intergenerational transmission of trauma, how individuals perceive health risks (arising from behaviours and environmental threats) and how they engage in help-seeking and help-giving behaviours for physical and psychological difficulties.

Intervening to Support Healthy Development – projects under this theme seek to increase our understanding of how people with diverse and complex needs, arising from physical, mental health, or neurodevelopmental conditions, can best be supported to thrive in their daily lives. Projects within this theme also focus on how assistive technology and digital platforms can be used to support and deliver interventions for lifelong learning.

Promoting Communities of Practice – Our research activity has a core principle of advancing the science of, and engaging with, communities of practice in the real world. This is reflected in how we co-construct research questions and designs with key stakeholders, explore the lived experiences of service users and practitioners, and train the next generation of scientist-practitioners. The integration of basic and applied research ensures a mutually reinforcing relationship between our research and the communities we hope to serve.

Principal Investigators

Elizabeth Nixon

Jean Quigley

Lorraine Swords

David Hevey

Olive Healy

Ladislav Timulak

Ben Butlin

Daragh Keogh