Assoc ProfessorAmanda Fitzgerald

Dr. Amanda Fitzgerald is Associate Professor in the School of Psychology at University College Dublin. Her research is focused on youth mental health, with a specific focus on youth co-design, early intervention including digital technologies, and implementation science methods in youth mental health.  She is Director of the UCD Youth Mental Health lab, which has collaborations with a number of youth organizations in Ireland such as Jigsaw-The National Centre for Youth Mental Health, Spunout.ie, Soar Foundation, and CyberSafeKids.

She is  currently Principal Investigator on Project ACCESS (Advancing Care through Single-Session Therapy): Examining the Implementation of Timely Youth Mental Health Interventions in Jigsaw Ireland, a Health Research Board-funded project in conjunction with Jigsaw- The National Centre for Youth Mental Health. She is co-Chief Investigator on a National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC, Australia) project, collaborating with global leaders to develop outcomes for online mental health services. 

She is leader of the Youth Engagement working group as part of the EU Cost Action YouthDMH, www.youthdmh.eu , an interdisciplinary network focused on enhancing research on the use of technology to support young people’s mental health.  She leads a programme of research on best practice in youth co-design in digital youth mental health technology.

She co-founded the Body Image Research Network (BIRN) with colleagues in UCD and DCU, an interdisciplinary person-centred network of excellence for research on body image and body-image related disorders. She was Principal Investigator on a Health Research Board funded network grant  Connecting Bodies: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on Body Image Research in Ireland to unite experts to identify key research and policy priorities in the field.   

She was a core investigator on the My World Surveys, www.myworldsurvey.ie Ireland’s largest national surveys of risk and protective factors of youth mental health in Ireland, aged 12-25 years (N=33,000).

Within UCD School of Psychology, she currently serves as Director of PhD/Mlitt programme.  In her former roles, she was co-Chair of the Athena Swan Self Assessment Team, co-leading the submission of the Silver application. She was formerly Director of the Masters in Psychological Sciences programme.

She is a member of the UCD Healthy Steering Committee and lead for the Mental Health subcommittee.  She sits on the Growing Up in Ireland Research Advisory Group (Ireland’s longitudinal study of children and young people) and on the National Nutrition Surveillance Centre Steering Group (guiding the roll out of the WHO Childhood Obesity Surveillance Initiative). 

She supervises a number of PhD and Masters students in the area of youth mental health. She is a member of the International Association for Youth Mental Health (IAYMH), www.iaymh.org a global organization focused on improving mental health outcomes for 12-25 year olds. She was former board member of Spunout.ie and Text About It 50808 and previously nominated as Executive Committee member of the IAYMH.