..to the University of Melbourne!

‘The enemy,’ as one of my Monash colleagues put it, since these universities are the two big ones within the city. But she said it with a smile and we very much intend to continue collaborating.

My now-colleagues at the Child Health and Wellbeing Program invited the Lab and me to join them. We know each other since a few years and I have always admired their work. Mostly for their a) research into issues that have deep impact on children’s lives, including trauma and migration; b) focus on participatory research, having young people co-design research and co-interpret outcomes; and c) translation of research to practice and policy, by building long-term collaborations.

So after 6 fantastic years at Monash, the Lab has a new home. Its goal will remain to improve support for children and young people who have been exposed to traumatic events, with an increasing focus on youth exposed to extreme trauma and/or in low-resource settings. The Child Health and Wellbeing Program sits within the School of Population and Global Health, which fits well with my interest in global and cross-cultural approaches, so I’m excited to get to know my new colleagues and their work. To avoid uprooting our Lab’s student-members, they will stay with Monash to finish their doctorates, while new team members will start at the new place!

As to this blog, I’m looking into giving it a new boost in the next few months. And to do that, I’d love to hear what you’d like to read about. What kind of posts do you find most interesting? The more information-dense ones, the more personal ones, or a mix? What topics or issues would you like to read about? Do you prefer posts in written format, or rather the audio-notes that I tested for a while?