Ellen Klemera

Dr Ellen Klemera has been working as a Senior Research Fellow in the Health, Young People and Family Lives unit at CRIPACC, University of Hertfordshire since 2005. Since 2016 she has been deputy PI for Health Behaviour in School aged Children (HBSC) England and in 2018 she became co-PI of the project alongside prof Fiona Brooks.

Ellen obtained her PhD in Developmental and Educational Psychology in Tbilisi (Georgia) and MSc in Research Methods in Psychology at Hertfordshire University (2005). She has expertise in young people’s and children’s health and emotional well-being through leading several projects investigating young people’s health, including the Eastern European Community Engagement Project (funder HealthWatch Hertfordshire Charity), Santander Partnership Research collaboraion support 2016/17 project:'Addressing the health and wellbeing needs of young people through school connectedness'(PI), a collaborative project, jointly funded by UH and the University of Technology Sydney/Faculty of Health: Inentional self-harm in adolescence(PI), British Academy funded research project to work on bilingual (bicultural) children's wellbeing in UK and Georgia, and others.

Over the past decade, Dr Klemera has led several publications on topics relating to young people’s health and emotional well-being, including work on family communication, self-harm and participation in physical activity. Ellen has disseminated research relating to young people’s health and well-being in areas of adolescents’ family life and parental communication, self-harm and physical activity through national and international publications and conferences.

Since 2009, Dr Klemera has worked as part of the English HBSC national team. From 2016, as the Deputy PI and then co-PI of the HBSC English team, she has organised the running of the project for the 2017/18 round, coordinating and managing both data collection and teamwork. Her roles and responsibilities in the English team includes coordinating the day to day running of the project.

Ellen is constantly developing networks, both in the frame of HBSC and around the world, to identify sources of funding, and she continues to build relationships in other countries for future activities (Georgia, Russia, and other Eastern European countries). As a chair of the HBSC Family Culture Focus Group, Ellen also coordinates development of the research on adolescent family life for the HBSC.