Kevin A. Matlock

Dr Matlock works in the Department of Psychiatry managing a variety of research projects related to well-being in university students. Housed within Professor Kate Saunders’ research group, the scope of these projects includes (a) designing and implementing mental health literacy trainings for students and staff; (b) developing an online self-management toolkit; and (c) continued deployment of U-Flourish, a longitudinal survey of student mental health and well-being conducted biannually at Oxford since 2019. These projects are conducted in parallel with six other universities across the UK as part of a collaboration with the Nurture-U Research Consortium.

Prior to coming to the University of Oxford, Dr Matlock held professional appointments at universities in North America, Asia, and Europe. At Cal Poly Humboldt in the United States, he conducted research related to biopsychology and lectured for more than 7 years on a broad range of topics in psychology. He also completed a PhD Fellowship in Medical Psychology at the University of Southern Denmark, and now holds a Junior Research Fellowship in Social Sciences at Worcester College.

Dr Matlock’s primary research interest is in understanding and improving well-being, in particular using multi-domain frameworks for quality of life where well-being is conceptualised across the physical, psychological, social, and environmental domains. He has pursued this interest using a mixed-method approach, including descriptive case studies for adults and adolescents with developmental disabilities at the community level, as well qualitative thematic analysis and large-scale quantitative analysis of clinical trial data for patients with diabetes at the international level.