CRFR Directors are drawn from various schools within the University of Edinburgh, to offer academic expertise and guidance relating to our evolving themes
Dr Emma Davidson
Director, CRFR
Emma is a Lecturer in Social Policy and Qualitative Research Methods and a co-director at the Binks Hub which champions community-led, arts-informed research. Her research interests focus on youth transitions and community studies, with particular interest in social infrastructure and inequalities. With fellow co-director Lynn, she has developed techniques to think about, handle and analyse large volumes of complex qualitative data.
Dr Nicola Boydell
Director, CRFR
Nicola is a Lecturer in Social Science and Public Health at the Centre for Biomedicine, Self and Society and Usher Institute, University of Edinburgh. Her work sits at the intersection of medical sociology, critical public health and healthcare improvement research.
Nicola’s research focuses on sexual and reproductive health, exploring what works, for whom, and why in the design and delivery of services – with a particular commitment to reducing inequalities in access to care. She uses qualitative and participatory approaches, and is passionate about working collaboratively in partnership with communities, healthcare professionals, and policy makers. Her work has spanned community-based approaches to HIV treatment and care, gender-based violence, and more recently a strong focus on contraception and abortion. This includes leading the THIS Institute Fellowship (2020–2024), which examined participatory approaches in sexual and reproductive health service improvement, and co-leading the SCOPE study, a Scotland-wide investigation into post-abortion contraception access with a particular emphasis on reducing inequalities. Her work spans the life-course and engages with questions of gender, sexuality, and reproductive justice that cut across CRFR’s research themes.
Prof Lynn Jamieson
Director, CRFR
Lynn is Professor of Sociology, Families and Relationships and a founding co-director of CRFR. She previously served as President of the British Sociological Association. Lynn is known internationally for her research on intimacy, identity and social change. Her current research interests include the power of families and relationships to influence responses to climate change and issues of sustainability.
Dr Shruti Chaudhry
Director, CRFR
Shruti is a Chancellor’s Fellow in sociology. She is a qualitative researcher focusing on migration, families and intimate relationships, ageing and the life-course, social change and gender and intersecting inequalities. Previously, she worked in women’s studies and development studies in India. Her doctoral research, also completed at Edinburgh sociology, was an ethnographic study of marriage migration in rural north India that explored the gendering of intimacy in an arranged marriage, often violent context. More recently, her research has focused on minority ethnic ageing in the UK, more specifically the relational lives of older adults of South-Asian heritage in Scotland.