Professor Martin Webber

Profile

Professional activities

• Chair in Social Work
• Director of the International Centre for Mental Health Social Research
• Senior Fellow of the NIHR School for Social Care Research
• Professional Lead for Social Work and the Programme Leader for Social Work programmes

Areas of expertise

• Mental health social work
• Development and evaluation of social interventions
• Social capital and social inclusion
• Evidence-based practice

Academic biography

I am a registered social worker with experience of working with adults with a learning disability and mental health problems. I am passionate about achieving social change through high quality social work and social care practice with vulnerable and marginalised people. I believe that this important work needs to be informed by rigorous research evidence. To achieve this goal, I work to produce high quality research evidence of relevance for practice and I strive to develop and maintain strong connections with service users and practitioners to help narrow the gap between the worlds of social work research and social work practice.

My primary research interest is the development and evaluation of social interventions with people with mental health problems. This includes primary epidemiological or methodological work; ethnographic work to develop intervention models; and experimental work to evaluate the effectiveness of interventions. I collaborate with health economists, psychiatrists, psychologists and other health scientists to maximise the effectiveness of my research. My teaching interests include research methodology and the practice implications of my research. I also have a growing number of PhD students who are working on empirical studies in social work.