Dr. Darragh McCashin is an Assistant Professor in the School of Psychology at Dublin City University (DCU), and is both Chair of The Observatory on Cyberbullying, Cyberhate & Online Harassment and Research Fellow at the ABC.
Darragh’s primary research interests include: digital youth mental health, clinical/forensic applications of technology, and researcher mental health. Previously, Darragh was a Marie Curie Fellow/PhD student at University College Dublin (UCD), examining technology-enabled youth mental health within the EU H2020-funded TEAM-ITN project, specifically the role of technology-assisted cognitive behavioural therapy for children using mixed methodologies. Darragh is currently a Working Group Chair on the ReMO COST Action Researcher Mental Health Observatory (CA19117), and sits on the management committee. A second strand to Darragh’s research is that of forensic/criminal psychology. With an MSc in Applied Forensic Psychology (University of York), Darragh has previously worked as an Associate Lecturer and Research Assistant in the Online-Protect research group at the University of Lincoln, investigating case formulation tools for those with convictions for internet sexual offences.
Isobel Walsh is a Research Assistant at the DCU Anti-Bullying Centre, and is contributing to a mixed-methods research project seeking to understand and prevent online racism in Ireland. Prior to working with the Anti-Bullying Centre, Isobel worked as a Research Assistant in the DCU School of Psychology supporting the development of an innovative new postgraduate programme.
Isobel completed her Bachelor of Arts in Neuroscience at Trinity College Dublin (2021) and received her MSc Psychology from DCU (2023). As part of her Masters degree, Isobel conducted a participatory design research project which explored stakeholder views on problematic gaming and produced co-designed solutions seeking to promote healthy gaming behaviour at individual and organisational levels.
Dr. Mairéad Foody is an Assistant Professor in Psychology in NUI Galway and Honorary Research Fellow in the National Anti-Bullying Research and Resource Centre. She has a PhD in Psychology and several years of international applied and research experience with young people. Dr Foody has published widely in the area of child and adolescent mental health and is particularly interested in the impact of cyberbullying and bullying on psychological development. She holds several prestigious awards for her research such as the Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship, the James Flaherty Scholarship and the Marie-Sklodowska-Curie COFUND Research Fellowship.
Catherine Baker is a Researcher with DCU Anti-Bullying Centre. She completed her PhD with the Online Civic Culture Centre at Loughborough in 2022, examining how the misogynist incel community leverage digital affordances to curate and distribute ideology to a mass audience. She is currently employed with DCU Anti-Bullying Centre on the EU-funded Gender Equality Matters (GEM) project, a primary education prevention programme aimed at addressing attitudes and norms that underlie gender-based bullying and gender-based violence. Her research interests primarily focus on gender, misogyny, digital media, counter-epistemic communities and social media platforms. Recent publications include a chapter on post-truth identities in the Routledge Companion to Media Misinformation and Populism.
Dr. Tijana Milosevic is an Elite-S Post-Doctoral Research Fellow (MSCA COFUND programme), jointly appointed with ABC and ADAPT SFI, focusing on social media policies and digital media use among children and youth. She is the PI on a Facebook-funded project “Co-designing with Children: A Rights-based approach to fighting Cyberbullying” and her most recent work examines the effectiveness of artificial intelligence (AI)-based interventions on social media from children’s perspective. She is also a member of the EU Kids Online research network and she has coordinated data collection for the EU Kids Online project in Serbia (nationally-representative survey on children’s digital media use).
Her first monograph “Protecting Children Online? Cyberbullying Policies of Social Media Companies” was published in The MIT Press Information Society Series and she authored and co- authored a number of articles on children’s media use, among other topics. At ABC, Tijana also led the Irish data collection for “Kids Digital Lives in Covid-19 Times (KiDiCoTi),” an international project coordinated by the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission (JRC). The project in Ireland included a survey on a national sample of children aged 10-18 about their digital media use and online risks during the Covid-19 lockdown. On behalf of ABC, she has testified about children’s digital media use and online safety in front of the Irish Parliamentary Committees (Oireachtas) threea times since 2019, and has given numerous media interviews to the Irish and international media.
Previously, Tijana also researched young children’s privacy, especially from commercial data collection, as a member of COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) DigiLitEY project. Tijana Milosevic completed her PhD at American University in Washington DC’s School of Communication. She obtained her MA in Media and Public Affairs from The George Washington University, also in DC. Before coming to Ireland, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oslo, Norway, Department of Media and Communication. She previously researched media coverage of cyberbullying in the US mainstream media and a range of topics from media coverage of the War in Iraq to climate change, public diplomacy, and the effect of copyright policies on visual arts community in the US. Milosevic interned and worked at media organizations, such as the BBC and Radio Free Europe; public affairs and public diplomacy organizations like Fleishman-Hillard and The Public Diplomacy Council; and finally as a teacher at the French International School in Belgrade, which sparked her interest in understanding children’s behavior, especially in relation to digital media.
