Dr Siobhan Mitchell

Expertise

Child and Adolescent Health

Biography

Siobhan’s background is in dance, training vocationally in ballet she developed an interest in health and wellbeing. Siobhan completed her MRes in Health and Wellbeing and was awarded an ESRC studentship in 2014 to complete her PhD exploring the psychosocial implications of pubertal timing for children growing up in an elite dance training context.

Siobhan has worked in the Children & Young People’s Mental Health Research Collaboration at the University of since 2018, working across a range of projects. Most recently, The Children & Young People Social Prescribing for Mental Health Project (CHOICES) which aims to extend the growing evidence base around social prescribing in the primary care and public health arenas by focussing on its use for children and young people.

Siobhan joined the Peninsula Mental Health Research Initiative (PenMHRI) in 2023 to support across key projects in relation to child and adolescent health. Siobhan has supported a number of projects, including the SELF study, which explores the impact of delivering school based DBT for CYP who report self-harming, and CAMHS goes wild, which explores using nature-based approaches in CAMHS. Siobhan has a particular interest in qualitative methods and knowledge mobilisation. In 2025, Siobhan completed an Innovation and Commercialisation Fellowship with SETsquared. Siobhan brings this learning and expertise to her work, including her role as the Impact Lead for the GW4-funded Network, Exploring pathways to children and young peoples mental health, which primarily focuses on research and knowledge mobilisation on the topic of puberty and mental health.

Siobhan also continues to work on projects relating to young people’s wellbeing in the dance sector. Most recently, Siobhan led the GuiDANCE project (Growing up in dance) in collaboration with partners from across the UK dance sector and funded by the ESRC IAA. This was a co-creation project which aimed to address the challenges associated with the pubertal transition in dance for young people and culminated in the creation of a set of guidelines for best practice in the dance sector. The continuation of this work has now been funded by the AHRC to support the development of the GuiDANCE Network which aims to create a network which can sustain this work going forward and to create tangible resources for the dance sector to share key messages and learning from our work to date.

Siobhan’s research interests are in child and adolescent mental health and development. More specifically, exploring how to support child and adolescent development in different contexts through the mobilisation of knowledge and research to support the implementation of novel approaches and interventions.

Qualifications:

• PhD Health and Wellbeing (University of Bath)
• MRes Health and Wellbeing (University of Bath)
• MSc Dance Science (Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance)