Iryna Mazhak

Affilliations:
Trinity College Dublin

Department:
Department of Nursing and Midwifery

Research interests:
Mental Health, Menopause, Gender Inequality 

ORCID Profile
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0190-0126

Biography

Dr Iryna Mazhak is a Research Fellow at the Trinity Centre for Practice and Healthcare Innovation (TCPHI), School of Nursing & Midwifery, Trinity College Dublin, in collaboration with St Patrick’s Mental Health Services (SPMHS). She also works on the Horizon Europe CARAMEL project, focusing on menopause and cardiovascular health.

An interdisciplinary researcher in medical sociology and public health, Iryna holds a PhD in Medical Sociology (2012) and degrees in sociology, public administration and medical sociology from Ukraine, the United Kingdom and Poland. For a decade, she studied socioeconomic and behavioural health inequalities in Ukraine and Eastern Europe, supported by AIAS MSCA-COFUND (Aarhus, Denmark) and Fulbright (University of Alabama at Birmingham, USA) fellowships. After Russia's 2022 invasion and her own displacement, she reoriented her research to the health of forcibly displaced women. At Masaryk University, she led one of the first empirical studies of Ukrainian refugee women's mental health, validating five psychological scales in Ukrainian, and as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie (MSCA4Ukraine) Fellow at RCSI, she led a mixed-methods comparative study of over 2,000 refugee women across Czechia and Ireland. She has 65 publications, including in European Societies, Journal of Migration and Health and Frontiers in Psychology, and a forthcoming Palgrave monograph on the mental health and coping of Ukrainian refugee women.

To the Centre she brings expertise in cross-cultural instrument validation, life-course and social-determinants measurement, mixed-methods and comparative welfare-regime analysis, and research with marginalised populations, together with PPI experience from Horizon Europe. 

Publications

Mazhak I., Paludo A., Sudyn D. Self-Reported health and coping strategies of Ukrainian female refugees after settlement in the Czech Republic // European Societies:  the special issue: “Understanding Ukrainian Society Before and After the Russian Invasion”, 2023, p. 1-27.

Mazhak I. Self-reported general health/psychological status of Ukrainian female refugees in the Czech Republic. European Journal of Public Health, 33(Supplement_2), ckad160-1632, 2023. 
Mazhak, I., Maltseva, K., & Sudyn, D. (2024). Assessing psychometric of the perceived stress scale and identifying stress-associated factors in a sample of Ukrainian female refugees in the Czech Republic. Journal of migration and health, 10, 100271.

Mazhak, I., & Sudyn, D. (2025). Psychometric assessment of the Beck anxiety inventory and key anxiety determinants among Ukrainian female refugees in the Czech Republic. Frontiers in psychology, 15, 1529718.

Mazhak I. (2023) Social Inequalities in Health: The Evidence from Ukraine // Poverty, Inequality and Social Justice. The Palgrave Handbook of Global Social Problems https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-3-030-68127-2_448-1