Our Co-Chairs
Mike Keogh
Mike is Senior Clinical Fellow/Honorary Consultant BioSciences
Mike is a clinical academic neurologist and has professional and personal experience of both caring and understanding the role and challenges that come with being a carer.
In a professional capacity, alongside seeing patients with neurological disorders that frequently require long-term care, he has organised and arranged a national children’s holiday for children with developmental disabilities that aimed to provide respite care for children and families. Stemming from this he also sat for several years on the board of this charity that provided care holidays for children, allowing insight beyond his professional role into the life that carers live and experience.
More recently, he has become step-parent to a child with disabilities providing him with real-life lived experience of day-to-day life as a carer and the challenges it brings and has experienced firsthand the impact of such a role on my work within the University and NHS.
Ana Lopes
Ana is a Senior Lecturer in Work and Employment at our Business School
She has lived experience as a carer for her partner and her research is directly related to Caring.
Her academic area of research is Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, within the broader areas of Employment Relations and Human Resource Management. Along with her personal interest, she also has a research interest in carers networks. Together with Mark Gatto (Northumbria University) who is the chair and founder of Northumbria’s parents and carers network), she has been involved in a two-year research project that aims to better understand and support parents and carers networks in UK universities.
Check out this article about Ana’s work regarding caring: https://wonkhe.com/blogs/can-parents-and-carers-networks-help-make-academia-more-humane/