Dr Katie Cunnah

Dr Katie Cunnah is a Chartered Organisational Psychologist whose work sits at the intersection of occupational health, wellbeing, and the design of sustainable working environments.

Her central focus is occupational wellbeing in high-stakes professional contexts - understanding what makes demanding work psychologically sustainable, and what happens when the systems around it fail to support the people doing it. This thread runs through her academic supervision, her consultancy practice, and her own research and writing.

Katie supports Clinical Psychology Trainees with the research aspects of their doctoral training on the Clinical Psychology Doctorate Programme at Hull.

As an Organisational Psychologist Consultant and Trainer with Arrisan (arrisan.com), a consultancy specialising in training and coaching for law firms, and with Leeds-based The Workplace Collective, she applies evidence-based organisational psychology to real-world workplace challenges - with a particular focus on psychological safety, culture, trust, and sustainable performance. She is also an ICF-trained coach, bringing a coaching lens to individual and team development alongside her consultancy and research work.

A core strand of Katie's practice is occupational stress risk assessment. She has worked closely with the UK Health and Safety Executive on stress risk methodology, and has completed independent consultancy projects applying this expertise - including a workplace stress management report for a UK university. Alongside Professor Fiona Earle, she developed a scale to measure stress risk in remote and hybrid working contexts.

This occupational health expertise extends into sector-specific research. Katie is building a developing programme of work on police wellbeing - including doctoral supervision on reasons for leaving policing outside retirement - and is beginning to extend this focus into the legal profession, drawing on her embedded work within the legal sector through Arrisan. Her broader portfolio of consultancy fieldwork spans police, fire and rescue, oil and gas, renewable energy, local government, and the NHS, addressing stress, fatigue, remote working impact, and organisational wellbeing more widely.

Running underneath all of this is a sustained commitment to EDI, systemic inequality, and social justice - most recently through a decolonising research project at the University of Hull - and an active interest in innovative methods, including the use of AI in psychological research practice, alongside her established expertise in qualitative and mixed-methods design.

Katie's doctoral supervision reflects this same throughline, with several projects directly addressing occupational and professional wellbeing - including policing, NHS workforce experience, SEN practitioner wellbeing following physical restraint, and peer support worker identity. A smaller number of supervised projects sit in adjacent areas of clinical and applied psychology - dementia, eating disorders, and suicide bereavement - reflecting both her earlier research background (she worked as a Research Assistant on a Horizon 2020-funded pan-European dementia project) and the value an organisational/systemic lens brings to service design and practitioner experience in these areas.

Previously, Katie served as Senior Psychologist and Operations Director at the University of Hull's Centre for Human Factors, and earlier worked as an Assistant Psychologist in adult inpatient mental health services. She has also founded and run three businesses, trained as a primary school teacher, and worked in management consultancy and recruitment in London - a varied background that informs her practical grasp of leadership, recruitment, and organisational life across sectors. Her doctoral thesis explored the relational and psychological aspects of chronic fatigue syndrome, reflecting a long-standing interest in systemic approaches to health.

Katie is qualified in Psychometric Personality and Ability (A & B) testing through Saville Assessment, is a member of the European Academy of Occupational Health Psychology, and has undertaken professional training in Coaching and Mentoring (ILM & ICF).