Dr Karen Matvienko-Sikar

Lecturer and Research Fellow, School of Public Health, University College Cork, Ireland.

Karen Matvienko-Sikar is a Lecturer in the School of Public Health, University College Cork (UCC), Cork, Ireland. Karen is also a Health Research Board Applying Research into Policy and Practice Research Fellow in the School of Public Health, UCC.

Karen is an internationally recognised health psychologist with expertise in maternal and child health, particularly childhood obesity and perinatal mental health. She has expertise in intervention development, core outcome sets, and behaviour change. Her research to date has involved developing a primary-care based infant feeding intervention for childhood obesity prevention, and development of the first core outcome set to standardise outcome measurement and reporting in trials of childhood obesity prevention interventions. Her work on childhood obesity prevention has influenced policy in Ireland and, in 2018, Karen was invited to address the Irish Parliament (Oireachtas) Joint Committee on Childhood Obesity.

In 2020 Karen received the European Association for the Study of Obesity New Investigator Award in Childhood Obesity. She has also been awarded the European Health Psychology Society Stan Maes Early Career Award; the Psychological Society of Ireland Division of Health Psychology, Hannah McGee Award for Excellence in Research/Practice; and a Commendation for the Society for Improvement of Psychological Science for her work on core outcome sets. Karen is also an advocate for open science practices and is a Catalyst for the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences.

Karen is an Associate Investigator of the CRE and will contribute to Stream 1, specifically development of the core outcome set. She will also contribute to other CRE research activities.

Read more: Dr Karen Matvienko-Sikar| Publications
Email: Karen.msikar@ucc.ie
Twitter: @KarenMSikar