Queens University Belfast
Community Embedded Researcher
Neal is our research Fellow and Community Embedded Researcher for the Belfast Community Catapult. His research focuses on the relationships between space, place and community, with particular interests in international migration, rural geographies and neighbourhood attachment.
Neal completed his PhD at Queen’s University Belfast, where his research examined place identity within Portuguese communities in small-town and semi-rural Northern Ireland. Neal brings strong mixed-method expertise to his work, combining in-depth qualitative research with census analysis and integrated dataset construction.
Neal has contributed to a range of interdisciplinary and community-engaged projects, including research with care-experienced young people, evaluations of community consultations and studies of place-based regeneration across Ireland.