Introduction
Professor Maria Lohan
Maria Lohan is Professor of Social Science and Health, Director of Research at the School of Nursing and Midwifery, and Deputy Director of QUB’s Centre for Evidence and Social Innovation (CESI).
Maria leads the Maternal and Child Health research group in the School and the What Works for Families strand in CESI. Her own research focuses on men’s reproductive and sexual health and involvement in parenting.
Maria is currently a consultant for the World Health Organization, advising on the evidence to engage men in sexual and reproductive health and rights. In recent years, she has been a Visiting International Scholar at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies, University of British Columbia (UBC) and a Visiting Professor at the School of Nursing at UBC, where she is a collaborator on a number of studies. Maria received funding from the ESRC to design a relationship and sexuality education intervention to involve young men in preventing unintended pregnancy. She is now leading a multi-site RCT of this intervention in schools across the whole of the UK, funded by the NIHR http://www.qub.ac.uk/sites/IfIWereJack/
The intervention she developed -- “If i were Jack” --is being rolled out universally to schools in Ireland, and the Australian version that she helped to develop with colleagues at Flinders University is being implemented in schools in South Australia. Maria is now beginning new work, funded by the MRC, with incarcerated young men which aims to understand better their experiences of fatherhood and to co-design an early intervention fatherhood programme with young men in prisons.