Amanda is a research fellow within Queen's Communities and Place (QCAP) supporting the eighth wave of the Belfast Youth Development Study (BYDS). Additionally, she provides public health expertise and data analytics and visualisation support to several other projects within QCAP, including work around substance use prevention and creating interactive data tools with community partners. 

Her PhD examined the role of social connection as a protective factor against suicide in adolescent boys and young men. Through the course of the project, she created the Andrizo Integrated Conceptual Framework to visualise the influence of gender and risk-taking behaviours on the development of suicidal risk in adolescent males.

Prior to coming to Queen’s, she worked as a surveillance epidemiologist in the United States and was a national subject matter expert on the use of syndromic surveillance data to monitor healthcare encounters for a variety of injury and violence topics. She is a clinical instructor at the University of Washington School of Public Health in the Department of Health Systems and Population Health, as well as being affiliate faculty at the University of Washington-Bothell in the School of Nursing and Health Sciences.

Her research interests include monitoring and prevention of suicidal thoughts and behaviours, substance use, interpersonal violence, and unintentional injuries. She prefers cats.