The core SHRN team is based at DECIPHer’s Cardiff office, details on who we are and what we do can be found below.
Maria Boffey
Knowledge Exchange and External Affairs Manager
Maria’s role in the SHRN Network is to manage its development and knowledge exchange, ensuring it meets the needs of schools, researchers, and key health and educational stakeholders. She provides support for primary and secondary schools, whilst developing the strategic national and regional partnerships that include Welsh Government; ADEW; Public Health Wales, education consortia and the third sector. Her passion for supporting the wellbeing of children has been a constant throughout her career, spending over 20 years within the third sector leading on a wide range of national programmes to support improved practice and policy outcomes for looked after children. She has also been a School Governor for the last 15 years in special, primary and secondary school settings. Maria has also worked on a number of research studies with Cardiff University, DECIPHer and CASCADE , as well as being an author of numerous wellbeing publications.
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Prof Simon Murphy
Principal Investigator of the School Health Research Network
Simon is the director of DECIPHer, having worked at Cardiff University since 2004. Simon’s interests are in children and young people’s health behaviours and working with policy and practice to improve health improvement efforts.
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Lianna Angel
SHRN Survey Manager
Lianna joined Cardiff University in 2012 and has worked across multiple research centres. She transferred to DECIPHer from the Centre for Trials Research (CTR) in 2019 and became the SHRN Survey Manager in 2021. She is responsible for running the biennial Student Health & Wellbeing Survey and the School Environment Questionnaire in all SHRN registered secondary schools across Wales.
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Nick Page
SHRN Analyst
Originally from Exeter, Nick moved to Wales in 2007 to begin his studies and have spent the whole of his academic career living and working within Wales. He was awarded a PhD in a public health-related field from Cardiff University in 2015, became a member of the WISERD team in 2016, and has been working at DECIPHer since January 2019.
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Dr Honor Young
Senior Lecturer
Honor joined DECIPHer and Cardiff University in 2014. She has been working as the deputy academic lead on SHRN since 2020. Honor’s research interests centre around interventions for health improvement in school and further education settings, with a focus on sexual health, dating and gender-based violence.
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Edna Ogada
Research Assistant
Edna finds the process of organising and managing data very calming. Originally from Kenya, she has worked on large health and social science data sets while living in the United States, Kenya, Tanzania and the United Kingdom. She has lived in Wales since the end of 2015 and joined DECIPHer as a data manager in April 2021.