Dr. Sarah Parker

Biography

Dr Sarah Parker is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Health Policy and Management, School of Medicine, Trinity College Dublin (TCD). With extensive experience leading qualitive and mixed methods research initiatives and teams, she is passionate about tackling complex social problems through direct policy- and service-level impact. Her research covers a broad spectrum of policy issues including those related to health, homelessness and social care systems. She currently works on the HRB-funded Foundations project, researching how COVID-19 has impacted on health system and policy reform, and is also part of the multidisciplinary team to receive Government funding to undertake the first national study of care-leavers in Ireland. As part of her current role, Sarah supervises at undergraduate (BA) and postgraduate (M.Sc. and PhD) level. She leads on the Research Methods and Dissertation module on the M.Sc. in Health Policy and Management (2023-present), lectures on the SPHeRE PhD programe (2022-present) and is Deputy Editor of the School of Medicine Newsletter, The Pulse (2024-present). She also lectured on the Introduction to Health Policy module as part of the BA in Social Studies, School of Social Work and Social Policy (2021-2023). She was recently appointed to the Postdoctoral Academy Committee in TCD (2024-present) and is also an Invited Member of the Focus Ireland Research Sub-Committee (2024-present) Prior to this, Sarah was a researcher at the Children's Research Centre, TCD, where she worked on several commissioned projects including a biographical study of women's homelessness and a qualitative longitudinal study of homeless youth and their families. Sarah holds several degrees from TCD including a PhD in Social Policy (2021), M.Sc. in Applied Social Research (2011) and BA in Sociology and Social Policy (2006). Funded by the Irish Research Council, she led an award-winning mixed methods study on the dynamics of family homelessness in Ireland as part of her doctorate. She has co-authored numerous peer-reviewed articles, reports and book chapters, achieving a h-index of 11 and 469 citations (Google Scholar). Her most recent collaborative work has been published in edited collections by Routledge, Edward Elgar (forthcoming) and Palgrave MacMillan as well as high-impact journals including The Lancet Regional Health - Europe, Housing Studies, International Journal on Homelessness, Child & Family Social Work, Journal of Family Issues, European Journal of Homelessness, HRB - Open, Frontiers in Public Healt, BMC Public Health and BMC Health Services Research.