Dr Emily Cooper

Emily teaches across several undergraduate and postgraduate courses within the Law and Policing school aligned to her research and expertise. She is the course lead for the MSc in Criminal Justice and MSc Social Research Methods and the Postgraduate Research Lead for the School of Law and Policing. Emily is also the Methods Northwest strand lead, representing the University in the North West Social Science Doctoral Training Partnership. She is also a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. She supervises postgraduate projects in her areas of expertise, in addition to a range of other topics within the criminal justice field. Emily is currently Principal Investigator for the ‘Policing Sextortion: improving understanding of the nature, extent and experiences of (re)victimisation project’, funded by the Vulnerability and Policing Futures Centre, and Co-Investigator for the ‘QUINTET’ study, which aims to improve the bereavement care for families affected by sudden child death. 

Emily completed her BSc degree in Geography in 2009 at Lancaster University, before remaining there to complete her PhD in Human Geography in 2014. Emily has over 10 years' experience teaching in Higher Education, having held previous lecturing roles at Lancaster University and Northumbria University before joining UCLan in 2016. She has taught across geography, criminology and policing programmes at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. She particularly enjoys mentoring new higher education practitioners and is a keen advocate for improving access to higher education and providing peer support for early career researchers.

Due to personal experience of sudden child death affecting her family, Emily is also a campaigner for improvements to both professional and societal responses to child death and bereavement, as well as an advocate for the importance of co-production in policy and practice. She regularly engages with the media raising awareness of sudden unexplained death in childhood and is an Ambassador for SUDC UK. She has also been involved in training professionals about best practice in responding to bereaved families.

Emily is also an academic representative for local police force and partner agency strategy groups in this field. She has also given a Tedx talk at Lancaster University in 2017 on sex work in the community (which you can view here). She is also very active on social media and particularly enjoys tweeting about research and academic life!