Jennifer MacDonald
Research Fellow
Department of Nursing and Community Health
Dr Jennifer MacDonald completed her BSc Psychology (Hons, first class) and MSc Health Psychology at the University of Stirling, and her PhD at Glasgow Caledonian. Her PhD involved using an extended Reasoned Action Approach to predict and explain ‘at-risk’ online older adults’ condom use intentions and inform the development of a future tailored intervention(s).
Jennifer has worked as a researcher at GCU since 2015. Her first role was with the Safeguarding Health through Infection Prevention Research Group, funded by the Scottish Infection Research Network as part of the Scottish Healthcare Associated Infection Prevention Institute (SHAIPI). She worked across various applied infection prevention and control research projects, bringing together her interests and expertise in infectious diseases, psychological theories and models of behaviour and behaviour change, and intervention development, implementation, and evaluation. Jennifer was also responsible for coordinating public and patient involvement and engagement activities for the Community Network (ChaiN) for SHAIPI.
Jennifer is now a Research Fellow with the Sexual Health and Blood Borne Virus Research Group. She was the lead researcher on the CSO-funded qualitative project 'Optimising services for people at highest risk of HIV: Developing best practice in delivering HIV PrEP through evaluation of early implementation across Scotland' (2018-2020). She currently works on the SEQUENCE Digital research programme (2020-2025), which will develop, trial, and evaluate an eSexual Health Clinic, with the aim of providing research evidence to improve sexual health for all in a digital NHS. Jennifer also co-leads the LUSTRUM2 project (2023-2024), which follows on from the LUSTRUM research programme and aims to co-produce brief multimodal digital health interventions to motivate and support sex partners to undertake STI and BBV self-sampling within the context of contract tracing. LUSTRUM2 has a sequential mixed-methods participatory design, including secondary analyses of LUSTRUM data, intervention co-production and integral evaluation of the co-production process, and creation of an implementation support resource.
Additionally, Jennifer is a PhD supervisor and a Chartered Psychologist with the British Psychological Society.