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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Having worked in the finance, international and online direct marketing departments of a publishing company for several years, Georgina’s career took a step in a very different direction when she started in her previous role with national Social, Emotional and Mental Health (SEMH) education charity, called Engage In Their Future. The initial focus of her role on providing administrative support expanded significantly over time to include, amongst other things, event organisation and delivery, finance management, online support, creative and content development, and membership liaison.
 
Georgina is excited to be joining the CORC team and is looking forward to working collaboratively with schools in their efforts to encourage and nurture the good mental health and emotional wellbeing of their communities through the services, resources and projects provided by CORC and the Anna Freud Centre.
 
As CORC’s Membership and Development Officer, Georgina is keen to draw on her experience of contributing to different projects and building positive relationships with stakeholders in order to best support and engage CORC members. 

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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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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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As Engagement and Participation Officer, Hannah supports CORC projects to strengthen their approaches to youth involvement, by developing new relationships, processes, and initiatives. Hannah is continuing to build the CORC youth network, ensuring effective dissemination to our young person audience. Hannah ensures young people’s views are reflected in all of CORC’s work and will be taking forward youth-centred projects.

Hannah’s experience over the last 12 years has included delivering and designing a range of interventions with young people and families, often leading on group projects for Children in Need. Hannah has an extensive background in running group work and delivering direct support sessions with young people who go through adverse life experiences resulting in low self-esteem, confidence, low mood, and anxiety. After completing a master’s in graphic design, Hannah chose to use her skills in setting up a resource for young people aged 8-25, focusing on creating resources around the teenage brain and how to manage in everyday life.

Hannah is passionate and excited to be working with the CORC team on youth engagement, Hannah is keen to draw on all her experience of engaging younger audiences ensuring we build a stronger approach to involving young people and embedding participation throughout CORC initiatives.

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As Communications and Marketing Officer, Chrissy leads on the development and delivery of all of CORC’s communications, across our different channels, ensuring members and the wider CORC network are informed about the best practice approaches, research findings, project collaborations, services and training – to support and inform the great work you do.

Chrissy has many years' experience and spent her career planning and delivering a wide range of communication campaigns and events for high profile national and international organisations, always ensuring an understanding of the audience. Her interest in Marketing is based in a love of psychology and behaviour.

Alongside this Chrissy has spent over 20 years undertaking various training in personal development, including NLP, Life Coaching, Steiner Wardorf Teaching Training and Psychodynamic Counselling, is a member of BACP and works one-to-one with individuals to support their mental health. She is extremely passionate in contributing to the well being of children and families, and all those who work in this field, and is delighted to combine her knowledge and experience.

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