Ingrid Young

Senior Lecturer

Biography

Background

Ingrid is a Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Biomedicine, Self and Society at the University of Edinburgh.  She is a medical sociologist who works with qualitative methods, including arts-based and participatory methods. She specialises in sexual and reproductive health and social justice, gender, biotechnologies and community activism. 

Prior to joining the University of Edinburgh, Ingrid worked at the Institute of Development Studies (2004 – 2007) and was a Research Fellow in Sexual Health at the University of Glasgow's Medical Research Council (MRC) / Chief Scientist Office (CSO) Social and Public Health Sciences Unit (2011-2016).

Qualifications

PhD in Sociology (Newcastle University)

MA in History (University of Waterloo, Canada)

BA (Hons) in History (Trent University, Canada)

Responsibilities & affiliations

 

 

Undergraduate teaching

Ingrid is the programme director for the Bioethics, Law and Society BMedSci Honours degree for 3rd year intercalating medical students. She also leads on social science and LGBTQ year 2 teaching for the MBChB programme; she leads on 2 modules for the Society, Ethics and Medicine  (SEAM) course and runs a trans health topic as part of the interdisciplinary Transitions course.

Ingrid also supervises Honours year dissertations for BMedSci and other programme students, and supervises MBChB Year 2 group projects on the Future of Medicine.

Ingrid is part of the MBChB Equality, Diversity and Inclusion committee, and leads on LGBTQ and gender inclusion. 

Postgraduate teaching

 Ingrid has contributed to a range of Masters in Public Health courses run by the Usher Institute. She currently supervises MPH dissertations, including projects such as: how can nursing be made more trans inclusive; the sexual health of homeless women; Pre-exposure Prophylaxis and stigma amongst Trans sex workers in Singapore; access to cancer screening for Trans communities; and HIV stigma amongst African Americans. 

Open to PhD supervision enquiries?

No

Areas of interest for supervision

Ingrid is not currently able to supervise PhD students for the 2023 intake. In future, she would open to PhD supervision enquiries, partiularly those relating to: Sexual and Reproductive Health; HIV; Pharmaceuticals for Prevention; Emerging Health Technologies; Gender; Sexuality; LGBT Health; Migration; Inequalities; Health Literacy; Health Activism; Qualitative Research Methods; Participatory Research and Knowledge Exchange.

Current PhD students supervised

Ingrid is currently supervising the folloiwng PhD students:

  • Yu-chen Lin | ICTs and disability (Science, Technology and Innovation Studies, supervising with Fadhila Mazanderani & Martyn Pickersgill)
  • Lisa Raeder | The Social Life of Sexual and Reproductive Health (Bio)Technologies | Chancellor's Fellowship Studentship (Centre for Biomedicine, Self & Society, supervising with Jeni Harden & Sarah Cunningham-Burley)
  • Sophie Buijsen | Knowing Sex: A Comparative study of the knowledge practices and experiences of adolescent girls in Scotland and the Netherlands | Alice Brown Scholarship (Science, Technology and Innovation Studies, supervising with Fadhila Mazanderani)

  • George Burrows | Identifying factors influencing sexual health and wellbeing among transgender adults in Scotland (external supervisor, University of Glasgow, MRC-funded students

  • Daniel Nyato | Social Networks, Livelihoods and HIV risk amongst Young Women in a post Cash Transfer Environment in North-western Tanzania (external supervisor, QMUL, Wellcome-funded studentship)

Past PhD students supervised

  • Chase Ledin | Post-AIDS: Queer Ecology, HIV and the Chronic After-Life | Edinburgh Global Scholarship (Edinburgh College of Art, supervising with Glyn Davis & Lukas Englemann)

  • Hani  Syahida Salim | Developing and piloting an ICT-based intervention for adult asthma with limited health litearcy to improve asthma self-management | NIHR RESPIRE PhD Studentship (supervising with Hilary Pinnock, Sazlina Shariff Ghazali, Lee Ping Yein)

Research summary

Ingrid is particularly interested in how experiences of and inequalities across gender, sexualities, race and technologies shape sexual health and wellbeing. Her research explores sexual and reproductive health and social justice, pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), critical HIV literacies, LGBTQ+ health, and health activisms. 

Current research interests

Ingrid currently co-leads two themes within the Wellcome supported Centre for Biomedicine, Self and Society: Beyond Sex and Beyond Bodies. Within this work, she leads on and collaborates with bioethicists, anthropologists, cultural theorists, artists, community activists and clinical practitioners on research and knowledge exchange relating to sexual and reproductive health, inequalities, LGBTQ rights and biotechnologies. Recent collaborations as part of this work include working with Agomoni Ganguli-Mitra (Law) and Theiya Arts on a Creative Scotland-funded performance piece, Maiden, Mother, Whore, which debuted in July 2023. Ingrid collaborates with Dr Donna McCormack (Strathclyde) on Capturing Chronic Illness (capturingchronicillness.wordpress.com), a project which explores how visual arts can explore, represent and re-imagine how we see and understand chronic illness. This work has produced a crowd-sourced photography exhibition on chronic illness, commissioned digital performance and most recently, an illustrated zine Bloody Chronix. This work continues through a recently awarded British Academy Knowledge Frontiers award for a project entitled Doing Disability Futures (2023-2025). Ingrid recently led on a knowledge-exchange project called Queers Coping With Covid in collaboration with The Love Tank. Funded by an ESRC IIA grant, this project explores examples of LGBTQ community practice and activist strategies that show not only innovation for survival during COVID-19, but the possibilities of collective queer care. Project website available here: https://www.queerhealth.info/projects/thewrap Ingrid was co-investigator on the ESRC funded research study Digital Intimacies (2019-2022). A monograph (Bloomsbury) with Jamie Hakim (Kings) and James Cummings (York) is forthcoming (2024) which is based on this research, exploring how queer men use smartphones to negotiate their cultures of intimacy in times of crisis.

Past research interests

Ingrid was PI on  "Sex, Drugs and Activism: Negotiating biological citizenship and pharmaceutical prevention" funded by a Wellcome Trust Seed Award in sexuality and health (2018 - 2019). This research project looks at PrEP in the UK as a case study to improve understanding of the role of community and clinical activism, sexual citizenship, and the use of pharmaceuticals for prevention in sexual health. Previous to this grant, Ingrid completed a 3-year Chief Scientist Office (CSO)-funded Postdoctoral Fellowship (2014 – 2017) in "Developing HIV Literacy". Through this work, she collaborated with health and community practitioners and other stakeholders (including NHS Greater Glasgow & Clyde, HIV Scotland, Terrence Higgins Trust, Waverly Care, aidsmap) to understand and support HIV literacy in the context of new and emerging HIV prevention technologies (e.g. PrEP). Ingrid undertook a 3-year study called HIV and the Biomedical, exploring the role of pharmaceuticals in HIV prevention, as part of her MRC Career Development Fellowship at the MRC/CSO Social and Public Health Sciences Unit, University of Glasgow. Ingrid was also a co-investigator on Scottish CSO-funded Optimising Services for People at Highest Risk of HIV, an evaluation of the first year of PrEP implementation in Scotland (2019-2021), led by Professor Claudia Estcourt (NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, Glasgow Caledonian University) and was a core member of the qualitative research team.

Knowledge exchange

Ingrid was awarded ESRC Impact Accelorator funding (2018 - 2019)  to develop knowledge exchange actvities as part of the Developing HIV Literacy project. Ingrid is currently working with clinical and community partners to explore how access to PrEP for diverse communities can be better supported. 

Ingrid is a co-author of the British HIV Association Pre-exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) Clinical Guidelines (2018), and is currently the lead on the equity chapter of the revised guidelines currently in progress. 

She has also been a member of the PrEP Monitoring and Research Group and the Education and Awareness Group, as part of the Scottish National PrEP Coordination group, run by the Scottish Health Protection Network since 2017. Her ongoing collaborations with Scottish NHS and third sector partners has resulted in two commissioned short films that focus on PrEP for Black African and Trans communities in Scotland. These films, along with other public facing materials feature on Scotland's NHS Inform website - https://www.nhsinform.scot/hiv-prep-pre-exposure-prophylaxis 

 

Ingrid was co-chair of IRESH (www.iresh.org.uk), Scottish Interdisciplinary Research in Sexual Health Network from 2018 - 2020 and continues to be an active member. 

Affiliated research centres

Organiser

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