Joanne Hughes is Director of the Centre for Shared Education at Queen’s University Belfast. She has led more than 20 research projects on these themes and has been awarded research grants from the EU, ESRC, British Council, British Academy, Nuffield, UNICEF, Atlantic Philanthropies, and a range of other sources. Her current research projects explore longitudinally the effect of inter-group contact between Protestant and Catholic pupils in Northern Ireland, and the development and effectiveness of shared education interventions locally and in international settings.