Karen Devries is a social epidemiologist with expertise in the prevention of violence against children and adolescents, and child protection.  She runs the Child Protection Research Group, and sits in the Social and Mathematical Epidemiology Group.  She is affiliated with the Gender, Violence and Health Centre, the Centre for Evidence in Disability, the Centre for Evaluation, the Centre for Global Mental Health, and MARCH.

Karen’s main research interests include: understanding the causes and consequences of violence against children and adolescents; understanding how resilience to adverse experiences is produced; and developing and testing interventions to reduce violence and other adverse experiences in childhood. She also conducts research on violence against women, sexual health, mental health, disability, and epidemiological methods. 

Her main research collaborations are currently in Uganda, Zanzibar and Cote d’Ivoire, and her work is funded primarily by the UK MRC, DfID, NIHR, the Wellcome Trust, and the UBS Foundation.  She is a member of the academic technical advisory board for the International Violence Against Children Surveys, and advises WHO on measurement of violence against women.