Engagement & Impact | Meet the Team

Community Engaged Research Officer

Email: zoryana.pshyk@tudublin.ie

Zoryana Pshyk is a Community Engaged Research Officer at TU Dublin, working on the Erasmus+ TOGETHERNESS project. She supports inclusive engagement practices, facilitates collaborative learning, and helps build research partnerships between universities and the communities they serve. Her current work includes designing and facilitating the Microcredential in Community Engaged Research Theories and Practices, and developing digital badges in the field for staff and postgraduate students.

Her practice rests on a straightforward conviction: that research and education are strongest when built with communities, through dialogue, trust, participation, and shared learning, and when they tackle the issues those communities are living with.

Before joining TU Dublin, Zoryana was a Community Connector on the PATH 3 College Connect programme. There she designed and coordinated outreach, mentoring, and post-entry support for groups underrepresented in higher education, among them refugees and people seeking asylum, Ukrainian students, Traveller and Roma communities, Further Education learners, and people with experience of the criminal justice system.

Her wider background spans peer-led research with asylum seekers and refugees, public engagement and advocacy, trauma-informed practice, and intercultural capacity building for educators across Ireland and Europe, often through partnerships linking higher education institutions, NGOs, and public bodies.

Zoryana is a PhD candidate in the Department of Adult and Community Education at Maynooth University. Her research examines participatory and peer-led methodologies, transformative and trauma-informed learning, intercultural dialogue, and the part adult education plays in democratic participation and collective belonging.

ORCID: 0009-0001-0252-7020

Zoryana Pshyk - TU Dublin Research