Speaker
Dr. Eva Sprecher
Research Fellow, Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology, University College London, United Kingdom
Biography
Eva Sprecher is a researcher focused on improving mental health support for care-experienced young people. She studied Experimental Psychology at Jesus College, Oxford, before training as a secondary school science teacher with a Physics specialism. During this time, she became involved in the project that evolved into the Lighthouse Pedagogical Trust, sparking her interest in how to better support children in care.
She completed an MSc in Developmental Psychology and Clinical Practice at the Anna Freud Centre and UCL in 2018, which included a placement at Carelink Southwark, a CAMHS service for care-experienced young people. Eva then undertook a PhD at UCL’s Psychoanalysis Unit, supervised by Dr Michelle Sleed and Professor Nick Midgley, completing it in 2023. Alongside her doctoral research, she worked as a Research Officer at the Anna Freud Centre on the Reflective Fostering Study, a randomized controlled trial of a mentalization-informed intervention for foster carers.
In 2022, Eva joined the ReThink study as a post-doctoral Research Fellow under Professor Rachel Hiller, exploring the mental health trajectories of care-experienced young people across key life transitions. In 2025, she began a new fellowship on the MyVoice study, another randomized controlled trial led by Professor Hiller, evaluating the impact of comprehensive mental health assessments for children aged 10–17 in social care.
From 2026, Eva will lead a five-year Wellcome Early Career Award titled Caring about Care: Coproducing intersectional understandings of how caregiving relationships impact the mental health of care-experienced young people.