Anne MacFarlane is Foundation Chair and Full Professor of Primary Healthcare Research in the School of Medicine, University of Limerick (UL), Ireland since 2011. She is the first female, and only social science, Full Professor in the field of academic general practice and primary care in Ireland.

Anne is Co-Director, with Professor Helen Phelan of an interdisciplinary Participatory Health Research Unit, at the School of Medicine, UL.  She is Director of UL’s World Health Organisation Collaborating Centre for Participatory Health Research with Refugees and Migrants.

Anne is internationally recognised for her research at the intersection of migration health, participatory health research and implementation science, particularly for cutting edge research about innovative theory and methods to inform co-production and knowledge transfer. She has extensive experience as a Principal Investigator and Co-applicant on numerous national and international research projects with a total research income of 25 million euro. She is currently leading a 600k euro project to improve refugee and migrant involvement in public health policy making, a collaboration between the Irish Department of Health and UL’s WHO Collaborating Centre for Participatory Health Research with Refugees and Migrants.

Her most recent studies are based on the sociological concept of participatory space. She is exploring refugee and migrant involvement in the space of clinical consultations (studies about the implementation of trained interpreters), spaces of research co-production (studies about music and singing as participatory methods and about the representation of refugee and migrants in clinical research) and spaces for service development (studies about participatory learning and action research methods in quality improvement and about migrant friendly health information systems).

Anne is active in national leadership for public and patient involvement in research through UL’s participation in the HRB and IRC funded national PPI Ignite Network. She is active internationally via her leadership roles with the World Health Organisation, the International Collaboration for Participatory Health Research, the European Public Health Association, the North American Primary Care Group.

Migration health, interpreter use in healthcare settings, public and patient involvement, participatory health research, participatory learning and action research, music and singing as participatory methods, implementation science, normalisation process theory, equity lens

My teaching is primarily linked to the graduate entry BMBS programme in the School of Medicine where I am discipline lead for Sociology in the Professional Competency Module, Years 1 and 2. I teach sociology centered on concepts of social constructionism, stigma and equity. My research on migration health has informed BMBS lectures and, also, the BMBS General Practice Attachment, Year 2.  Most recently, this research has informed new micro-credentials on interpreting designed to inform a new stackable Graduate Certificate in Community Interpreting. I am actively involved in the development of a new Graduate Diploma in Participatory Health Research, launching September 2025, with responsibility for a module on participatory learning and action research.