Dr Edel Walsh (PhD, PGDTLHE, MA) is a health and wellbeing economist and full-time Lecturer in the Department of Economics at Cork University Business School, University College Cork. She has a strong and sustained research portfolio in health and wellbeing economics, with a focus on understanding key health outcomes, including depression and strain, as well as vital wellbeing indicators such as life satisfaction, happiness, and loneliness. Her research aligns closely with SDG 3: Good Health and Well-being, and has been published in several ABS-ranked journals including: Review of Social Economy, Journal of Health Services Research & Policy, International Journal of Social Economics, Community, Work & Family and Economic and Social Review. Dr Walsh has presented her research extensively at both national and international conferences.

Her current research programme spans several interconnected themes. One strand examines loneliness among young adults in Europe, exploring how childhood social and family disadvantage shapes loneliness outcomes in early adulthood. A second strand investigates life satisfaction among older parents, including the role of adult child coresidence. A third strand addresses work-family balance, examining how work hours and job characteristics affect the life satisfaction of working mothers and fathers. Other research examines pay gaps in the Irish context. Across all of these areas, Dr Walsh employs rigorous econometric techniques and statistical methods, including propensity score matching and multilevel modelling, using large-scale datasets such as the European Social Survey, the Labour Force Survey, Growing Up in Ireland, and the EU Loneliness Survey, analysed using Stata and SPSS.

Dr Walsh has secured funding as PI, Co-Applicant and Collaborator from the Irish Research Council, the Irish Child and Family Agency - Tusla, the Irish Hospice Foundation, the Department of Social Protection and CUBS and has collaborated on interdisciplinary projects spanning economics, health sciences, and applied social studies. She has supervised two PhD students to completion — one in health economics examining catastrophic health expenditure, and one in wellbeing economics examining the determinants of subjective wellbeing in China. She currently supervises PhD students working on topics including flexible working and post-school pathways for young people with disabilities.

Dr Walsh is affiliated with the Institute for Social Science in the 21st Century (ISS21) at UCC and is co-lead of the ISS21 Ageing Research Cluster. She is a member of the UCC Futures cluster on the Future of Work and the Economy. Her research on work-family balance, flexible working, and the wellbeing of workers and families speaks directly to this cluster, contributing an economics of wellbeing perspective to questions about how evolving work patterns shape individual and household outcomes. Her research also contributes to SDG 5 (Gender Equality) and SDG 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth).

Dr Walsh was honoured with a Teaching Hero Award by the National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning in 2021. As well as lecturing across more than 20 different economics modules throughout her career, Dr Walsh has developed particular expertise in quantitative methods for research. She was invited to contribute to postgraduate research methods education on the Doctor of Social Science programme at UCC, where she has taught on the Statistical Analysis for Social Research module (SS7005) since 2018. Her expertise was also called upon by the Irish Management Institute (IMI), where she taught quantitative data analysis and advanced econometric techniques on the Data Business programme. 

Academic Qualifications