Rowan Streckfuss Davis & Felicity Hudson joined us in autumn 2022 to help prepare for our Summit, and compile legacy outputs from the Emerging Minds Network. Together they also wrote a brilliant blog over on the Mental Health Research Incubator, making the case for why you should attend research conferences as an early career researcher.
Hello! I’m Rowan (he/him), one of the interns in the Emerging Minds team for autumn 2022.
For the first part of my internship I worked with the team to plan and implement the Big Emerging Minds Summit in October – helping coordinate a lot of the workshop aspects of the Summit, and ensuring that everything ran smoothly. I am now working on collating legacy outputs from the Summit and Network so that findings reach a wide variety of stakeholders.
In addition to my role with Emerging Minds, I am currently completing my master’s degree in psychology at Oxford Brookes University with the aim of becoming a Clinical Psychologist. My present research explores gender and mental health, with a focus on young LGBTQIA+ people.
I have previously held roles in mental health support, education, and advocacy, covering areas such as eating disorders in young people, sexual and domestic violence, and LGBTQIA+ health and wellbeing.
I am passionate about promoting intra-community psychological support, in particular for queer and trans communities; improving accessibility to psychological research; and centring lived experiences in mental health policy development.
I’m excited to work alongside a range of researchers, practitioners, service users, carers, and policymakers to exchange ideas and experiences and to discuss how we can take the next steps to make real-world progress for children’s and young people’s mental health.
You can connect with me on Twitter @rsdavis0607.
Hi! I’m Felicity. I joined the Emerging Minds team just a few weeks before Rowan and started off learning how to edit videos to advertise the online Summit. I also helped organise the Delegate Profile Book and other resources for the day, and the exhibition, something which I’m continuing to work on now as we prepare the legacy website for the Summit and wider network. I am exploring the legacy of Emerging Minds, its successes, and looking forward to the work that is still to be done in the understanding of children and young people’s mental health and the implementation of research.
During my undergraduate I was a peer supporter and welfare officer, which is where my interest in working in mental health first started. As a welfare officer I organised mental health workshops and freshers’ events for undergraduates at our college. The Big Emerging Minds Summit was a big step up from this, with more than just a few undergraduates to organise, but it’s a challenge I really looked forward to getting involved in.
I also currently volunteer for SHOUT, a crisis helpline, and I have previously worked on a paper by a PhD student looking into interventions which would be appropriate for parents with psychosis. Both of these roles have furthered my interest in research based around improving the current services in order to address the complex nature of the challenges faced by many service users.
If you would like to get in touch, you can email me at felicity.hudson@psych.ox.ac.uk.