Dr. Sue Pattison is an academic supervisor for BSc and MSc research projects. Sue has a background in teaching and researching internationally, with an interest in the mental health and well-being of children and young people. She has worked with several governments and education departments including Wales, Northern Ireland, Turkey, Kenya, Hong Kong and the Gambia, and her research was instrumental in getting a counsellor into every school in Wales and Northern Ireland.
Emily Blakemore is the psychology experimental officer at Arden University. Her role is vast but includes being the editor of the school newsletter and managing the Arden Psychology Twitter page among other various engagement projects. Emily graduated with a BSc in Psychology with Criminology but has found that her interests lie firmly within the health aspect of psychology which motivated her to undertake an MSc in Health Psychology.
Since 2010, Dr James Au-Yeung has been a psychology lecturer at Arden University. His academic background is rooted in cognitive science, with degrees in computer science, language and linguistics - as well as in psychology. He has over 30 years of research experience in human language processing and speech production. His specialist area is in stuttering and he has developed a theory on stuttering, which has gained widespread interest across the world, and has been studied and tested on Dutch, Brazilian Portuguese, German. English and Korean speakers.
Dr Konstantinos Arfanis is a social psychologist who completed his PhD in Lancaster University. His thesis was entitled “Changing Men: The impact of training 'soft skills' on employees, the working environment and relationships” and was supported by an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Collaborative Award in Science and Engineering (CASE) award. His specialist interests lie in identity, emotions, work-life balance, patient safety, online misinformation, and gender and masculinity.
Dr Rachel Marchant is a lecturer at Arden University teaching on our MSc Psychology course. Before joining Arden, Rachel taught for several years in the Schools of Psychology and Medicine at Birmingham University. Rachel’s interests include neuroscience, psychology, cognition, perception and consciousness, hallucinations, mental health and psychiatry, brain imaging and stimulation methods, psychometrics, and qualitative and quantitative analysis. Rachel is also interested in pedagogy and andragogy, and is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
Dr Shannon DeBlasio is a lecturer within the School of Psychology and Social Sciences, teaching criminology and forensic psychology modules and working to support students through their BSc and MSc studies. Before joining Arden, Shannon worked within the prison estate. She spent seven years in a category B male prison undertaking a series of roles including treatment managing the offender behaviour change programmes, working non-operationally as a substance misuse practitioner, and within the security department as an intelligence analyst.
Dr Mark Pettigrew (BA Hons; MA; PhD; FHEA) is an award winning researcher and criminologist. After completing his doctoral research on capital punishment and death row incarceration in the United States, Mark began his career researching the use of whole life imprisonment in England & Wales and the crimes that give rise to the sentence. Since then, Mark has published extensively on sexual paraphilic disorders and their role in homicide and serial killing.
Dr Isla Masson is a programme leader for criminology and sociology courses at Arden University. Her research interests range from female offenders, gender, and motherhood to restorative Justice, rehabilitation, incarceration, penology, offender management, and prisoners’ families, among other related topics. Isla has written a great number of publications which focus on these subjects including reducing the harm of short term imprisonment and restorative justice with female offenders.
Having taught on criminology, criminal Justice, and combined degree programmes at Sunderland, Northumbria and Teesside Universities since 2013, Dr MarkBushell has a wealth of experience in the higher education industry. He also has proven qualitative and ethnographic research skills, acquired whilst researching migrant workers in the North East night-time economy, a project for which he recently submitted his PhD thesis. His areas of academic interest include critical criminology, violence, labour markets and social harm.