Professor Mary Lynch, Executive Vice Dean for Research, Faculty of Nursing and Midwifery, Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. Mary is a Registered General Nurse, holds a MSc in Sustainable Rural Development and a PhD in Health Economics both from Queens’s University Belfast. Mary is a Senior Fellow of Advance HE (SFHEA), and a trained Social Return On Investment (SROI) practitioner. Mary holds honorary visiting professor roles at the Faculty of Life Science and Education, University of South Wales, and the School of Health and Life Sciences, University of West of Scotland, where she provides health economic expertise for joint research projects and PhD studentships. Mary collaborates on research addressing health and wellbeing issues which take a life-course approach to the methodology and conducts economic evaluation of public health interventions. Mary's methodological expertise is in applying non-market valuation techniques; Stated and Revealed Preference techniques; incorporating Cost Benefit Analysis (CBA), Social Return on Investment (SROI), in estimation of social value of public health interventions. Mary's specialism is in the field of social prescribing and research interests span the areas of public health, environment, behaviour change and valuing public goods and services. 

Mary's portfolio of research extends to health and wellbeing, physical activity, nature based social prescribing, use of community assets and rurality. Mary has successfully attracted funding from a range of sources including Welsh Government, Health and Care Research Wales, ESRC, NESTA, KESS 2, Welsh European Funding Office: Accelerate Wales Programme and European Regional Development Fund, Interreg VA 2Seas Mers Zeeën and NIHR. Please click here to read more. 

Mary is Co-PI on one of eight NIHR projects (£20M programme) on extreme weather events “Warning system for Extreme weather events, Awareness Technology for Healthcare, Equitable delivery, and Resilience” (WEATHER) project (NIHR £2.29M). Mary established and lead the Social Prescribing Evidence Hub (SPEH) in Ireland which will be instrumental for the growth and generation of evidence for social prescribing in Ireland as well as in the capacity-building of healthcare practitioners who want to deliver greener healthcare.