My main research interest over my career has focused on the role of education in divided societies, although I have also carried out some significant work on aspects of equality and inclusion through education. Most of this work has been carried out in Northern Ireland, although I have been invited by international organisations to work in the Middle East (United States Institute of Peace) and South East Europe (Council of Europe, British Council and various UN agencies). Given my leadership roles within Queens over recent years (2005-2010 Head of the School of Education; 2010-continuing, Pro Vice Chancellor) I have consolidated my research activity and now mainly focus on work on shared education. This represents an innovative approach to addressing issues related to ethnic and religious dfferences in education in Northern Ireland and has received very significant funding support from Atlantic Philanthropies and the Internaiotnal Fund for Ireland. The shared education approach arises from a critique of previous approaches within education to addressing community relations and has developed a practical alternative aimed at achieving systemic change through the promotion of collaborative networks of schools in which pupils and teachers take classes across a number of schools. Over a period of four years we have supported 24 networks of mainly post-primary schools and in the most recent year over 5,000 pupils took over 3,000 regular classes in neighbouring schools of a different denominaitonal tradition. Most of my activity related to this project in recent years has focused on advocacy for shared education as a policy imperative and this has achieved some considerable success: shared education was adopted as an explicit policy commitment in the manifestoes of four of the five main political parties in the 2011 NI Assembly election and a commitment to shared education goals was included in the Executive's Programme for Government. In addition, we have received interest in bringing the model of shared education to Macedonia, Malaysia and Israel, with a collaborative project in Israel already in receipt of some funding support from the British Council. Given all this interest and attention, the shared education initiative has the potential for a 4* impact statement for the 2014 REF.