CORC Team

Kate is Head of CORC and leads research, informatics and service support teams in taking forward CORC’s mission: promoting the meaningful use of evidence to improve child and youth mental health and wellbeing. Kate is also Head of Innovation and Dissemination at the Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families. Her background is in service development in a local authority context, and in particular applying data-driven approaches to embed a focus on outcomes. She has been active in improving service collaboration and coordination around community needs through her work across a range of public, voluntary and community sector bodies – in particular in regeneration contexts. Recently Kate has been exploring how evidence and feedback loops can improve the impact of self-care (non-professionally mediated approaches) in child and youth mental health, as well as continuing to improve CORC’s support to young people, commissioners, mental health practitioners and schools in making best use of evidence to improve outcomes.

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As Programme Manager for CORC, Nick works directly with members as well as on a range of projects in collaboration with CORC partner organisations. Nick joined CORC after working in schools, first as a teacher and then as head teacher of a large London primary school. Through his work with children he saw the importance of effective support for children’s mental health and wellbeing and worked with partner organisations to develop practice in school. He is particularly interested in the wellbeing of the most vulnerable children.

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Ben is the lead of CORC Informatics, which supports CORC’s member services and central team in processing and managing large data sets efficiently. He has particular experience in the fields of data handling and information governance. Current work with partnerships of organisations in the health, education and social care sectors aims to link data sources to consider service user outcomes from different perspectives. Before joining CORC, Ben managed data collection and report preparation for the child and adolescent mental health services payment system project, which involved supporting 20 pilot sites across England on improving data quality. Ben has previously worked at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine on research into health policy implementation and commissioning.

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Julian is Research Lead alongside Jenna Jacob at CORC and lecturer in evidence based child and adolescent mental health at UCL. Julian Edbrooke-Childs is also Head of Digital Development and Evaluation and Senior Research Fellow at the Evidence Based Practice Unit (EBPU). Julian’s research focuses on evidence based child and adolescent mental health, and includes projects which consider factors relating to person-centred care, shared decision making and evaluations of effective practice. Julian also leads on the management and evaluation of digital innovation grants for mobile health interventions.

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Jenna is Research Lead alongside Julian Edbrooke-Childs at CORC. Jenna’s research focuses on patient-centred care and outcome measurement, with a particular interest in goal setting and tracking in therapeutic settings. Jenna brings a wealth of experience of the practical aspects of outcome monitoring, including data spec development, measurement and data handling and analysis through a variety of roles held within CORC over the past decade. Jenna is particularly interested in the direct application of research to positively impact the lives of children with mental health and well-being difficulties.

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Jasmine Harju-Seppänen is a Research Associate at CORC. Jasmine joined CORC in 2021 while in the final stages of her PhD at UCL, which examined predictors of psychotic-like experiences in children and adolescents. Jasmine has worked on a number of projects alongside her doctoral work, including with the Mental Health Policy Research Unit and the COVID Trauma Response Working Group.  

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Anisa joined CORC in April 2019. Her day-to-day responsibilities include validating and managing datasets, creating reports for CORC members, and aiding with data analysis across other projects. She has a background in digital marketing (she previously worked as a Programmatic Analyst in a digital marketing agency), and a master’s degree in Bioinformatics from Queen Mary University, giving her experience in extracting and analysing a wide variety of dataset using R, SQL and Python. She uses her data analysis skills to contribute towards improving mental health services for young people, and gaining greater insight into mental health measures.

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Sally is a skilled project manager with extensive experience of business transformation and improvement initiatives within multiple organisational settings ranging from grass roots voluntary to county wide commissioning partnerships. Previous roles have enabled her to refine her interpersonal and communication skills to improve engagement with key stakeholders and partners throughout all stages of a project. Increased knowledge and understanding of outcomes measurement and evaluation tools and techniques, specifically within children and youth services, has been gained through more recent experiences. Sally is an excellent facilitator with strong influencing and negotiation methods, ensuring the best outputs and outcomes for any work.

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As Regional Officer for the Midlands and South West, Lee seeks to support organisations and services to develop their evidence based and outcome focused approach for service improvement. Lee developed his passion for this work supporting the mental health and well-being of children and young people over 12 years across voluntary and statutory sectors. This experience gave him a keen understanding of the needs of children, young people and their families and a commitment to putting them at the centre of all support for them. Lee is excited by the variety and diversity of work that takes place for children and young people and seeks to better understand, to demonstrate and to improve the effectiveness of this support.

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Martha Reilly joined CORC as Projects and Membership Officer in 2018. For the last decade Martha has worked on a wide range of market research project. To date her work has focused on public sector and social research, working with both quantitative and qualitative projects. She has specialised in qualitative social research projects, predominantly for government and charity sector clients. Prior to this, Martha worked in a support role in several home treatment teams for the NHS in adult mental health services. Martha works particularly on the day to day needs of members, supports projects and provides support and admin to internal and external colleagues. 

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Anja leads on the development and delivery of CORC communication and marketing strategies and to engage with the vast CORC network and to disseminate best practice approaches & research findings to improve outcomes in child mental health and wellbeing. In her previous roles, Anja focused mainly on Operations, Strategy, Promotion and Campaign Management for children and literacy organisations in the UK. As certified Digital Marketing Professional and AgilePM Practitioner, she devised innovative and effective campaign strategies and had the overall responsibility for the successful execution and monitoring of educational projects to improve outcomes for children and young people in primary and secondary school settings with SEND and literacy difficulties in a systemic and aspirational way. 

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As Youth Engagement Officer, Rachel supports CORC to strengthen our youth involvement, by developing new relationships, processes and initiatives. Rachel is building the CORC Youth Network, ensuring effective dissemination to the young person audience, ensuring young people’s views are reflected in CORC’s work, and taking forward youth centred projects. 

Rachel has worked across various health organisations, with a particular interest in health inequities and the social determinants of health. She previously worked at Medact, supporting health workers to campaign around the wider political determinants of health. Before that, she led Student Minds’ policy, research and co-production work. As a part of that role she was on the Core Management team of the UK’s Student Mental Health Research Network. Prior to that she worked at the University Mental Health Advisors Network. 

Rachel is an executive member of the International Association of Youth Mental Health, and an active member of The People’s Health Movement. 

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