Born in Bradford Centre for Social Change at York - Funded Projects
Born in Bradford Centre for Social Change at York is proud to fund eleven research projects, exploring a range of topics including health, youth, community, wellbeing and social outcomes.
Developed in collaboration with partners across Bradford, the projects build on BiB's unique datasets to generate evidence that can drive real policy change.
2025 Cohort
Aniela Wenham – Youth, Benefits, and Mental Health
This project investigates how welfare policy affects the mental health of under-25s. It explores the links between conditionality, sanctions, and insecure employment, aiming to inform youth-responsive welfare and employment policy.
Adam Formby – Pathways to Adulthood: Supporting 16–18-Year-Olds in Bradford
Using Age of Wonder data, this project examines youth transitions in the context of high numbers of young people in poverty who are also not in education, training or employment. Co-produced with young people and service providers, it will generate actionable insights for improving education, employment, and wellbeing outcomes.
Vanita Sundaram – Racially Minoritised Girls’ Experiences of Sexual Harassment
This study focuses on racialised sexual harassment in schools and communities, addressing a major evidence gap. Working with young people, educators, and specialist organisations, it aims to improve local responses and inform safeguarding policy.
Kelli Kennedy – Co-producing Bradford’s Just Transition to Net Zero
In partnership with Bradford Council, this project integrates co-production into the district’s Climate Action Plan. A cohort of climate community researchers will be trained to strengthen the district’s co-production infrastructure, working closely with the CoPPeR network.*
*This project was enabled by the Born in Bradford Centre for Social Change at York, with funding provided by University of York and with support from the Economic and Social Research Council Impact Acceleration Account 2023-2028 (grant reference ES/X00435X/1
Paul Cairns - Developing an AI Assistant to Support Access to and Analysis of BiB Data
This project will develop a proof-of-concept LLM fine-tuned on BiB research papers to auto-generate annotations for the BiB Data Dictionary, improving the findability of over 25,000 variables for researchers outside Health Sciences. The model will be made publicly available via Huggingface.
2026 Cohort
Pete Dale – Beats and Belonging in Bradford: DJing for Youth Wellbeing and Inclusion
Building on promising pilot evidence that DJ programmes can enhance young people’s wellbeing, confidence and engagement, this project tests a scalable model for integrating DJing into mainstream school music in Bradford. The project will embed DJing workshops into three Bradford secondary schools to investigate impact on wellbeing, cultural identity and school engagement by combining quantitative wellbeing measures with qualitative interviews.
Kate Andersen – Childhood Matters: a co-produced exploration of how children's wellbeing is impacted by household social security receipt
This project has the overall objective of investigating the impacts of the UK social security system on children's wellbeing through a qualitative study co-produced with an ‘Experts as Evidence’ panel of parents who receive social security. By filling the gap in the evidence base, this project will help meet Bradford Council's objectives of understanding child poverty and how best to tackle it and will look to inform the Labour Government's strategy for reducing child poverty by the end of the current parliament.
James Myers – Investigating the social gradient of adolescent loneliness in the Born in Bradford Age of Wonder Cohort
This project will use the BiB Age of Wonder dataset to investigate why loneliness is more prevalent among socioeconomically disadvantaged adolescents, using advanced multilevel modelling. Patient and public involvement and engagement (PPIE) and co-production with young people from Bradford will be central throughout.
Evangelia (Lia) Chatzidiakou – Predicting indoor environmental health risks to support equitable retrofit policy in the UK
This project seeks to develop predictive models of indoor environmental health risks in Bradford homes which are undergoing energy efficiency retrofits, using sensor data from 300+ BiB homes. It will aim to assess how large-scale retrofits interact with changing climate conditions, particularly for vulnerable households.
Jennifer Sweetman & Amanda Perry – AGENSY: Assessing Gambling trends and Establishing a Network to Support Young people in Bradford
This is a two-phase project using BiB data to model gambling prevalence among young people, followed by community consultation workshops to map support provision and co-develop harm-reduction intervention recommendations. Phase one will explore the Born in Bradford (BiB) dataset to produce a series of regression models. Phase two will develop a network and explore the co-development of an intervention using community consultations.
Laura Fox & Edmund Coleman-Fountain (co-leads) – Co-designing and piloting an Inclusive Evidencing Framework to support research inclusivity across BiB and the wider Bradford community
This project will co-design and pilot an Inclusive Evidencing Framework ensuring learning-disabled young people with diverse communication modes shape research and policy. The research will draw from Bradford Council's Post-16 SEND Review as a real-world case study, adapting ADLib communication tools through co-production workshops.*
*This project was enabled by the Born in Bradford Centre for Social Change at York, with funding provided by University of York and with support from the Economic and Social Research Council Impact Acceleration Account 2023-2028 (grant reference ES/X00435X/1