A researcher has joined the Wolfson Centre for Young People’s Mental Health as a Senior Lecturer and is co-leading on plans to support the quality of quantitative research and open science across the Centre.

Dr Yulia Shenderovich joined the Wolfson Centre in the spring of 2021 and she works in the schools focused research workstream underway at the Centre, in partnership with DECIPHer within the School of Social Sciences.

Yulia completed her PhD at Cambridge University in 2018 and her research interests include programmes and policies that can promote youth mental health and prevent violence affecting young people, and, more broadly, in the factors that support young people to thrive.

Dr Shenderovich said: “I have really enjoyed my first few months at the Wolfson Centre and recently made the move to Cardiff, having previously been based in Oxford.

“My previous research has focused on reducing and preventing violence that affects young people. I am especially interested in how programmes and policies are implemented in practice and how they can be scaled up.

“My work at the Wolfson Centre will focus on researching how schools support young people’s mental health and how programmes and policies can boost that support. I will also be facilitating the quantitative and statistical learning within the Centre: planning ways we can support the quality of quantitative research and open science in the Wolfson Centre, together with Dr. Lucy Riglin.”

Dr Shenderovich added: “I became interested in mental health research because I know from personal and professional experience that good mental health is important for our quality of life. I came to mental health research through working on programme evaluations in social policy, education, and criminology.

“I think the stigma around discussing mental health has been going down in many places, which is a great development – although there is still a long way to go.

“We have a growing understanding that mental health is linked to many family, social, environmental, economic factors, which we often measure at the level of an individual. I think it can be challenging to incorporate a multi-disciplinary and multi-dimensional perspective into the traditional ways of doing research, although the field is making progress in that direction – and the Wolfson Centre is an example of an interdisciplinary approach.

“Research on young people’s mental health can give us information on how to support young people to have a healthy youth but also to give them a good foundation for the future.”

Dr Shenderovich concluded: “I’m looking forward to continuing to work closely with colleagues across the Wolfson Centre to improve mental health outcomes for young people. The last eighteen months have been incredibly challenging for everyone, and perhaps especially challenging for young people. The work we are trying to do here at the Centre, in collaboration with young people themselves, policymakers, schools, the NHS, third sector organisations, and other partners is timely and needed.”

You can watch Dr Shenderovich talking about violence prevention programmes in a recent short lecture, available here.

Yulia Shenderovich

shenderovichy@cardiff.ac.uk