Queen's Management School Members

Dr Matthias Blum

Matthias is an economic historian with research interests in anthropometrics, health and wellbeing, and long-run perspectives on economic development. He is a Lecturer in Economics at Queen's Management School, and a Research Associate at Queen's University Centre for Economic History. His research focuses on the global development of health, nutrition and human capital over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In addition, Matthias works with colleagues at St Andrews, Sussex and Waikato, New Zealand, on the long-run development of sustainable economic growth.
Dr Hilary Downey

Hilary is a Lecturer in Management in the Queen’s Management School. Her most recent research has focused on the Temple project in Derry/Londonderry in terms of impact and wellbeing of an arts intervention in the context of a divided society. Ongoing research addresses the concept of consumer vulnerability in terms of eHealth and self-responsibilzation, specifically in relation to Type 2 diabetes with colleagues in Nth America; transformative consumer research community members working in the area of transformative services research. She is also currently involved with an interdisciplinary group at Queen’s, the Medical Humanities group, which brings together medical and humanities colleagues to explore arts interventions and wellbeing in relation to mental health and obesity. Colleagues from the QUB Public Health are involved in this group; focused on a project, ‘Changing Attitudes, Changing Lives’. Other research interests in ageing and disability has initiated networks within the school of sociology to work on an ageing project (this is in the early stages), which will be part of a larger project, Improving Children’s Lives. In addition, she received the prestigious Kinnear award in Washington DC in November 2015; for a paper with colleagues in the Social Justice group (part of the transformative consumer research community). This paper was voted the best paper in 4 years (2011-2015) to be published in the Journal of Public Policy & Marketing.
Mark Farrell

Mark is a qualified Actuary and Programme Director of the Actuarial Science and Risk Management degree programme in the Queen’s Management School. After obtaining a first class degree in Mathematics and Sport Science at Loughborough University, Mark spent a number of years working in various actuarial roles in London, Toronto, Belfast and Dublin; before eventually moving into academia. Mark’s main research area is in Enterprise Risk Management, but he also has research interests in insurance technology and in particular the impact of the Internet of Things (e.g. wearable technology) on insurance product development and pricing.
Dr Alan Fernihough

Alan is a Lecturer in Economics at Queen’s Management School, Queen’s University Belfast, and a Research Associate at Queen's University Centre for Economic History. Prior to joining Queen’s, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Trinity College Dublin. He received his PhD in economics from University College Dublin in 2012. His main research interest is in Irish historical demography and development. His work has been featured in journals such as Demography, Explorations in Economic History, Economics and Human Biology, and the Journal of Population Economics.
Dr Matthias Flueckiger

Matthias is a lecturer in Economics at Queen’s Management School, Queen’s University Belfast. His research lies at the intersection of health economics, development economics, and international trade. Recent research projects include investigating the effects of disease environments on the spatial distribution of urbanisation and economic development.
Dr Patrick McCole

Dr Patrick McCole is a Senior Lecturer in Marketing at Queen’s Management School, Queen’s University Belfast. Patrick’s main research interest is in the examination of the nature and role of consumer or end-user trust in various contexts.  Patrick has published widely in the area of trust and online purchasing behaviour but his current interest is focused on consumer privacy-calculus decisions in the Internet of Things (IoT) era, with a particular focus on the health and insurance industries.  Patrick has published in the European Journal of Information Systems, Information and Management, Journal of Business Research and MIS Quarterly, among others. To date, Patrick has supervised four PhDs to completion in areas related to his main research interests.  Patrick also holds professional qualifications from the Higher Education Academy (FHEA) and The Chartered Institute of Marketing (MCIM).
Dr Sara Moutinho Barbosa de Melo

Dr Sara Melo is a Lecturer in Management at Queen’s Management School. Her research interests include healthcare management, innovation, organisational learning and the role of objects and the built environment on organisational dynamics. Sara is currently involved in two international research projects. One of these, which also involves researchers from three Brazilian universities, studies innovation processes in software development. The second project focuses on the prevention of healthcare-associated infections and involves a team of researchers from the UK and Brazil. In 2014, Sara published a monograph (with Matthias Beck) entitled Quality Management and Managerialism in Healthcare: A Critical Historical Survey. She is a member of the editorial board of the Global Journal of Health Science.
Professor Mark Palmer

Mark is a Professor of Marketing at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests are on the work of social actors in institutions. The specific research areas focus on how the work of social actors, for example, in creating marketing strategy initiatives, innovation projects or new business models, is enabled and/or constrained by institutional arrangements. He is currently researching the institutional arrangements of temporary spatial clusters (e.g. workshops, trade fairs or conferences), market creating co-opetition logics tensions (e.g. private/public, digital/non-digital), and systems logics and traditions of innovation (e.g. the City and the textbook).  These ideas have been applied to range of institutional settings including technology, academia, retail and heritage. His work has been published in Industrial Marketing Management, European Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Management, Journal of Strategic Marketing, International Marketing Review, Studies in Higher Education, International Business Review, Organization, Journal of Economic Geography and Environment and Planning A.
Dr Heike Schröder

Dr Heike Schröder is a Lecturer in Human Resource Management at Queen’s University Belfast. Her research interests focus on demographic change, comparative HRM and the firm-level management of an ageing workforce in Europe and Asia. She is furthermore interested in the impact of the national institutional policy context on the one hand and organisational age management on the other upon individual-level career transitions and trajectories of workers aged 50 plus using a life course perspective. Heike is currently publishing research on the effect of ill-health and workplace accommodation upon career outcomes of older individuals in Germany and Japan. She has participated in research projects funded by the British ESRC and British Council on organisational-level age management policies and practices across Germany, the UK and Japan and is currently working with Korea Labour Institute, South Korea on a research project evaluating the impact of institutional change on retirement timing. Her research was published in Human Relations, Journal of Social Policy and Human Resource Management Journal.