Niamh is a Senior Lecturer in Law at WIT and a criminologist with interests in other fields including social science, sociology, philosophy and health sciences. Her research interests include understanding how different parties contribute to and experience the process of punishment as well as understanding the processes and philosophies underpinning specific punishment practices in comparative contexts. Niamh's first substantive piece of research focused on the sentencing practices and philosophies of Irish judges. Since then she has researched and published on a range of related topics including penal decision-making, prison use, pre-sentence reports, community sanctions, offender supervision and comparative breach processes, drug courts and problem-solving justice. Niamh regularly presents her research to and engage collaboratively with a variety of national and international research networks including the European Society of Criminology’s Working Groups on Community Sanctions, and on Sentencing and Penal Decision Making.  Her sentencing research has been cited in a number of Law Reform Commission (LRC) reports, most recently LRC’s Report Suspended Sentences in 2020. In 2018,  Niamh co-edited a book on comparative breach processes with Professor Miranda Boone (Leiden University, NL), published by Routledge called The enforcement of offender supervision in Europe: Understanding breach processes. She supervises both MA and PhD research students across a range of topics and welcomes new research students.

Dr Jennifer O’Mahoney is a Lecturer in Psychology at the Waterford Institute of Technology and a Chartered Member of the Psychological Society of Ireland. She is also Co-Director of the Crime & Society Research Group, and a Senior Researcher at INSYTE (The Centre for INformation SYstems and TEchno-culture), both based at WIT.  Her research focuses on how victimology and trauma are remembered and narrated; the relationship between memory and cultural heritage in digital humanities; and activism and social change. She is the primary investigator of the Waterford Memories Project (www.waterfordmemories.com), which examines historical institutional abuse in Ireland, and the Irish Principal Investigator on SASCA (Support to Adult Survivors of Child Abuse in institutional settings), a 24 month European project, co-financed by the Justice Programme of the EU.  She is a member of the Management Committee of EU Cost Action “Cultures Of Victimology: Understanding processes of victimization across Europe”, which aims to to develop an innovative, functional and overarching theoretical framework for cultural victimology.  Jennifer has recently received funding from the Irish Research Council, Creative Ireland, Royal Irish Academy, and Heritage Council for her ongoing work with The Waterford Memories Project.