Masters in Ageing & Public Policy

Kieran Walsh is Professor of Ageing & Public Policy and Director of the Irish Centre for Social Gerontology (ICSG), National University of Ireland Galway. Kieran has extensive experience in ageing and public policy and interdisciplinary social gerontology research and has published extensively within the field of ageing. Before taking up the role of Director of the ICSG, he served as Project Director of Project Lifecourse within the Institute for Lifecourse and Society, a €1.5 million three-year programme of work dedicated to capturing the subjective realities of children and youth, older people and people with disabilities in their neighbourhoods and communities. With a track record of working closely with senior levels of public policy and professional practice, Kieran is focused on translating research into real-world impact and integrating this experience in the design of impactful research and teaching programmes. He has played a leading role in the development of international multi-site and interdisciplinary research studies. Kieran’s research interests and expertise focus on: social exclusion in later life; the relative nature of disadvantage in cross-national contexts; place and life-course transitions; and informal and formal infrastructures of care. Kieran is also Chair of the European COST Action CA15122 on ‘Reducing Old-Age Social Exclusion’ (ROSEnet – www.rosenetcost.com), which has over 180 members from 41 different countries. With objectives that address critical gaps in research, policy, and international interdisciplinary research capacity, ROSEnet aims to overcome fragmentation in conceptual innovation on old-age exclusion across the life course, in order to address the research-policy disconnect and tackle social exclusion amongst older people.

Dr. Áine Ní Léime is Deputy Director of the Irish Centre for Social Gerontology. She has a PhD in Sociology and Social Policy from the University of Dublin, Trinity College. She is currently P.I. for the Irish strand of an EU (NORFACE) funded cross-national project, Dynamics of Accumulated Inequalities for Seniors in Employment (DAISIE) running from 2018-2021 involving colleagues from the Cech Republic, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK. While her recent research focuses on gender, employment, pensions and older workers, she has research expertise in creativity and ageing, leisure, volunteering and ageing.  She completed a Marie Sklodowska Curie International Outgoing  Fellowship (2015 – 2018) spending two years in Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio (mentor Professor Dale Dannefer) and a final year at NUI Galway. She was PI of this EU-funded cross-national study entitled Gender, Older Workers and the Lifecourse (GENDOWL) – a comparative, qualitative study on gender and extended working life using an innovative life-course approach. She was Chairperson of COST Action IS1409 a research network: Gender, Health and the impact of Extended Working Life Policies in Western Countries for which she was the main proposer. The COST Action ran from April 2015 to April, 2019.

Eamon O’Shea is a Personal Professor in the School of Business & Economics and was inaugural Director of the Irish Centre for Social Gerontology (ICSG) at the National University of Ireland, Galway. He is currently Director of the National Centre for Social Research on Dementia at NUI Galway. He holds an M.A. from University College Dublin, an M.Sc. from the University of York and a Ph.D from the University of Leicester. He has published over 100 scientific papers in refereed journals, including publications in top-ranked journals such as the Journal of Health Economics, Social Science and Medicine, Age and Ageing, Ageing and Society, Health Policy and the International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry. Professor O’Shea has authored/co-authored 15 books and monographs, mainly in the field of ageing, dementia and social policy. His work has been influential in setting the agenda for the reform of services and policies for people with dementia in Ireland. He was Chair of the National Economic and Social Forum Expert Group on Care of the Elderly in 2005/06 and co-authored the influential Creating Excellence in Dementia Care report in 2012. He is currently a member of the Implementation Group for the Irish National Dementia Strategy.

Patricia Conboy is Head of Global Ageing, Advocacy and Campaigns with HelpAge International, the secretariat to a global network of organisations advancing the right of all older people to lead dignified, healthy and secure lives. Patricia leads a team promoting age-inclusive policy and practice through providing thought leadership, technical advice, advocacy and campaigning tools and including the voices of older people in our work. Prior to joining HelpAge in 2016, Patricia was director of Older & Bolder, a national alliance of NGOs campaigning for older people’s rights in Ireland.

Nena Georgantzi, Policy Coordinator Human Rights & Non-Discrimination, AGE Platform Europe and PhD Fellow, National University of Ireland Galway. Nena has been working for 10 years for AGE Platform Europe (AGE), the largest EU network of older people’s organisations, where she leads policy and advocacy on human rights at EU and international level. She has been involved in the drafting of the 2014 Council of Europe recommendation on the rights of older persons and in the ongoing political process around a new UN convention on the rights of older persons. She is member of the Steering Group of the Global Alliance of the Rights of Older Persons and has acted as a consultant for the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, covering issues of ageing and of disability. As PhD fellow with the National University of Ireland in Galway (NUIG) Nena is finalizing the first empirical study on the meaning of human rights for older persons and the added value of a new treaty. She has authored several articles and chapters on human rights and ageing and speaks regularly in expert meetings and conferences. Nena is a law graduate with postgraduate degrees in human rights (MA, Université de Strasbourg, France) and social protection (MA, KU Leuven, Belgium). She is also a registered lawyer under the Thessaloniki Bar in Greece.

Dr Maeve O’Rourke, PhD (Birmingham), LLM (Harvard), BCL (University College Dublin) is Lecturer in Human Rights Law and Programme Director of the BCL Law and Human Rights, a newly established undergraduate degree programme at NUI Galway. Maeve’s research interests are primarily in the development of the rule against torture and ill-treatment, human rights protections in institutional and care contexts, access to justice and redress for systemic and so-called ‘historical’ human rights abuses, and human rights research and advocacy methods. She was awarded her PhD (entitled ‘Older People, Dignity and Human Rights: Towards the Development of the Rule against Torture and Ill-treatment in International Human Rights Law’) in 2018 from Birmingham Law School where she was supervised by Professor Fiona de Londras and Professor Rosie Harding. Between 2015 and 2017 Maeve was a Visiting Scholar and Occasional Lecturer at University College Dublin School of Law where she established a Human Rights Clinic for LLM and MSc Human Rights students and co-taught an undergraduate Social Inclusion Law Clinic.

Maureen Maloney is a lecturer at NUIG. Her teaching interests include Reward Systems, Business Communication and Human Resource Management. She is completing her PhD on the topic of occupational pensions, using a bounded rationality framework to evaluate the effectiveness of communication policies in promoting reasoned individual pension decisions. Maureen is a member of the Pension Policy Research Group at Trinity College and the European Network for Research on Supplementary Pensions. She has organised numerous conferences for pension policy topics.