About
Dr Aaliyah Shaikh is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Liverpool, a research consultant and trauma-informed educator. At Liverpool, she has worked as an Independent Research Consultant on AHRC-funded research into health and social care with and for people living with energy-limiting chronic illnesses. Through the University's Impact Accelerator Award she contributed to a toolkit and practical guidelines for improving appointment and booking systems for people with chronic illness, drawing on interviews and her own lived and professional knowledge, as part of NHS-facing knowledge-exchange work.
A University of Cambridge graduate, Aaliyah was awarded her PhD in Health Psychology by City St George's, University of London in 2023. Her doctoral thesis explored British Muslims' experiences of the perinatal period through a decolonising approach that centred Islamic epistemology, leading to a novel research model.
She holds an Honorary Research Fellowship at City St George's, where she teaches a lecture on perinatal mental health and cultural awareness, inclusivity, families and communities. Additionally, as a visiting lecturer, she was invited to teach on the Cross-Cultural and Anti-Discriminatory Practice module of the Counselling Psychology Doctorate programme, where she introduced her own framework, 'The Rahmah Approach to Psychology', discussing faith-integrated, trauma-informed care. She trained as a psychotherapeutic counsellor before moving into research, consultancy and education, and is an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Aaliyah also founded Luminous Academic Mentoring Pathway (LAMP) to support students from marginalised backgrounds through their PhDs and leads the Psychology and Mental Health community within the Muslim Researchers Network.
Aaliyah is the founder of 'The Rahmah Approach to Psychology: Trauma-Informed Systems Thinking', which is a faith- and culturally attuned framework for building physically, emotionally, relationally and sensory-safer spaces, services and systems across healthcare, education, community and organisational settings. It integrates nervous system awareness, sensory safety, lived experience and relational leadership to support sustainable, people-centred change. She has delivered training on this to staff at an NHS Talking Therapies service as well as doctoral students. She is the editor of the forthcoming book: Muslim Women and Psychology (Routledge, 2027), in which her own chapter sets out the approach in print for the first time.
Her newest initiative, A.C.E Design Labs, extends this thinking into Trauma-informed design and content for practitioners, researchers, and educators.
A growing area of interest for Aaliyah is late-recognised and undiagnosed autism in women, particularly those from marginalised backgrounds, including South Asian and Muslim women. She is intrigued by the two-way relationship between autism and complex trauma: how autistic traits can be masked by trauma, and how the pressure to mask, when conditions go unrecognised and unsupported, becomes traumatic in itself. This extends to how autism intersects with cultural expectations and the layers of disbelief and discrimination women encounter in healthcare and beyond, and how it connects to wider health inequalities and disparities. She is also interested in the link with perimenopause, when masking often becomes harder to sustain and previously hidden traits come to the surface, leading many women to recognition or diagnosis for the first time. It remains an emerging and under-researched area that she hopes to contribute to.