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Co-Director of IC Research, Cambridge Public Health
Co-founder, IC-ADAPT Consortium, University of Cambridge
Member of Cambridge Public Health Research Group
Dr Eolene Boyd-MacMillan is a social psychologist working in a public health framework with a public mental health promotion focus on wellbeing and resilience. Her work develops and tests community-based interventions to increase self-regulation and social cohesion and to reduce destructive social polarisation and inequalities.
She uses participatory, collaborative and community-based research methods to develop and test contextually informed and culturally sensitive research programmes to promote wellbeing and multi-levelled resilience using the general cognitive processing model of IC or ‘integrative complexity’ (Suedfeld, 2010). IC research explores the interplay of how people think, feel, and interact with other people (individuals, groups, communities) by focusing on the ‘how’ of thinking, rather than on the ‘what’ of thinking or beliefs.
Her IC work led to co-founding the IC-ADAPT Consortium. Her current research includes:
- The EU Horizon 2020 project DRIVE project, an interdisciplinary exploration in four countries of the role of social exclusion and public mental health factors (e.g., wellbeing and resilience) as contributors to reciprocal, destructive social polarisation.
- The development and supervision of a new experiential and participatory IC intervention for young people and those working with them in Sweden.
- The development of inter-disciplinary collaborations focusing on community and policy responses to climate change in Myanmar.
- Public mental health promotion focused interventions to reduce digital harm
- Expressions of resilience and resistance among frontline healthcare workers in Australia, US, and UK during the COVID-19 and variant pandemic.
These projects and other collaborations involve the use and application of the IC-ADAPT model.
Past work includes an on-line survey exploring the relationships among zero-sum mindsets, social networks, and COVID-related experiences in a northern European city and directing the IC research programmes, ‘I SEE! Scotland’, funded by the Scottish Government (2012-2017) IC intervention in Scotland), ‘Conflict Transformation’, funded by Ripon College Cuddesdon, University of Oxford (2012-2018), and associate teaching in the School of Health in Social Science, University of Edinburgh (2007-2011).