I am a specialist social care academic and researcher and Deputy Director, Social Care and Society.  I lead on research capacity development in social care through: management and supervision of staff; ensuring grant funding; and strategic planning and managment.  

My research has included: service evaluation for adults with serious and longstanding mental health problems; older people and long-term care; psychological and social care services for military veterans; cost-effectiveness analyses (with a particular focus on social care); policy evaluations; preference elicitation studies; dementia home support; preventative assessment in adults and older people.

I work actively with user and carers groups of people with dementia, the Greater Manchester Public Community Involvement and Engagement Forum, and organisations supporting recruitment of participants to research studies.  I am Social Care Specialty Lead for the Greater Manchester NIHR Clinical Research Network with a role to develop support for recruitment to social care research studies.  I am a member of the Applied Research Collaboration (ARC) Greater Manchester, Healthy Ageing Co-Investigator team. 

For Teaching & Learning: I am:

• Dissertation supervisor for Masters in Public Health and MA Social Work students.
• PhD supervisor for students at Manchester and other universities.
• Tutor for Year 1 and 2 Personal Excellence Path (PEP) MBChB students
• Developing two external training modules to train paid formal home carers throughout the world (‘Anxiety and Depression in Old Age’ and ‘End of Life Care and Advanced Care-planning’) for courses run by Age Care Technologies (ACT^TM)

I have worked in social care throughout my professional life; My background is in psychiatric and medical social work, including statutory work and assessment of cases of deliberate self harm of patients attending Accident & Emergency. I have held research appointments previously at the Institute of Psychiatry, London and St James's Hospital, Leeds.  

I am an active collaborator; with university researchers internationally, local authority and health staff and third-sector organisations.  My current work is in the use of social care routine data, digital assessments and solutions for social care organisations, integrated data (between social care and the NHS), dementia support, improving social care research capacity and supervising post-graduate students in public health and social care research.  I am a specialist senior social care research advisor for the North West NIHR Research Design Service.

 My research interests are in analysis of routinely collected data; home support and community initiatives for dementia; the measurement of outcomes and well-being in dementia, particularly utility measurement for economic evaluation; evaluating integrated care; measurement of risk, frailty and social vulnerability in older people; cost-effectiveness analysis, with particular reference to social care; economic and micro-simulation modelling.

Professor Catherine Robinson, Director Social Care and Society, University of Manchester

Together In Dementia Everyday (TIDE) 

Sight & Mind CIC (Cecilia Toole, CEO) 

Professor Linda Davies, University of Manchester

Professor John Keady, University of Manchester 

Professor Paul McCrone, University of Greenwich, London

Professor Peter Bower, Chair in Health Sciences, University of Manchester

Professor Niels Peek, Professor of Health Informatics, University of Manchester

Professor Will Dixon, Chair in Digital Epidemiology, University of Manchester

Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA)

Leadership Fellow, National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) School for Social Care Research (SSCR)

Member of the NIHR SSCR National Capacity Building Management Team, and the NIHR Social Care Incubator Steering Group (Social Care Incubator (nihr.ac.uk), aiming to build capacity for social care research 

Chair, Research Sub-Group, Social Care Innovators, Institute of Health and Social Care Management 

Member (social care) Mental Health Implementation Network Advisory Board, ARC South London (June 2022 – present).

Review Panel Member, NIHR Pre-doctoral Local Authority Fellowship (PLAF) scheme

Member of Expert Advisory Group (Social Care Economics Scoping Review), National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE)/York Health Economics Consortium (December 2016 – May 2017)

Research Partner, Age Care Technologies International ACT Assessment (https://agecaretechnologies.org/); Professor Ian Philp, CEO. Winner of the 2021 Healthy Ageing Innovation Prize of the United Nations World Summit for the Information Society (WSIS). 

Honorary member, Manchester Institute for Collaborative Research on Ageing (MICRA)

Member, DEMON Network: an international network applying data science to dementia and dementia trials (DEMON | DEMON Network (demondementia.com)

Member of Leadership Team, British Society of Gerontology International Special Interest Group on Ageing, Business and Society

Multivariate statistical models, including relative weights metrics; cost-effectiveness evaluation; cost-utility measurement; data envelopment analysis; preference choice experiments as applied to social care; performance measurement techniques; policy analysis.

• PhD Community Medicine (Long-term Care), University of Manchester 2007
• MSc Psychiatric Social Work, University of Manchester  1995
• BA (Hons) Applied Social Science, First Class, University of Central Lancashire  1989
• Certificate of Qualification in Social Work, University of Central Lancashire  1989