Nina joined the Children and Young People’s Centre for Justice (CYCJ) in October 2013. Prior to this, she worked at Glasgow City Council, helping to develop the city’s evidence-based approach to youth justice policy, practice and service development and also managing the Youth Justice Research and Development Team.
As CYCJ’s Senior Research Fellow, Nina leads our Research Workstream. This involves developing and implementing the research strategy, supervising the research team, co-ordinating the research programme and ensuring that this work helps CYCJ meet its aims and objectives, as well as undertaking research.
Nina’s key research interests are the experience and impact of loss, bereavement and trauma in young people and how these experiences interface and shape contact with the justice system. Of particular interest is the overrepresentation of young men in justice-settings, and how their exposure to loss, bereavement and trauma might shape their developing masculinities, identities, behaviours and outcomes. She is also interested in institutional and organisational responses to trauma, and the realities of trauma-informed approaches in practice.
Nina is currently leading on a UKRI-funded project ‘Men Minds: Co-producing change for better mental health for adolescent young men at the margins’. The two-year project commenced in January 2023 and is a collaboration with young men and colleagues at the Universities of Strathclyde, Monash University and the Mental Health Foundation. Men Minds aims to advance adolescent mental health research by increasing understanding about how we can effectively engage marginalised adolescents in co-producing research, as well as co-produce more accessible mental health research methods for adolescent young men.