Dr. Karen Matvienko-Sikar

Dr Karen Matvienko-Sikar is a Health Psychologist and HRB Research Fellow in the School of Public Health, University College Cork. She obtained her PhD, MA and BA from the School of Applied Psychology, University College Cork. Karen’s research interests are in the area of maternal and child health, particularly perinatal stress and health outcomes. Karen has experience and expertise in developing, implementing and evaluating interventions for maternal and child health in antenatal and primary care settings in pilot and feasibility trials. Karen has experience and a keen interest in development of core outcome sets. She recently led on the development of a core outcome set for infant feeding interventions to prevent childhood obesity, which was supported by the HRB-TMRN and the Irish Research Council. Karen also collaborates with the COMET initiative on their annual updates of core outcome sets for comparative effectiveness research. Karen is currently leading on a Study Within a Trial (SWAT) in the area of core outcome sets and questionnaire response rates.