Virginia Braun

Academic career

After undergraduate and masters studies in psychology at the University of Auckland, Braun received a Commonwealth Scholarship to Loughborough University with Celia Kitzinger and Sue Wilkinson as her advisors for her 2000 thesis, The vagina: an analysis.

Braun returned to as a lecturer in psychology Auckland in 2001, rising to full professor in 2017.

Her 2006 paper "Using thematic analysis in psychology" with Victoria Clarke in Qualitative Research in Psychology has more than 240,000 citations according to Google Scholar. It is also - according to Google Scholar - the most cited academic paper published in 2006, and according to Nature, the 9th most cited research paper of all time.

Braun was editor of Feminism & Psychology between 2008 and 2013. She received a Distinguished Leadership Award from the American Psychological Association's Committee on Women in Psychology in 2013.

In 2015/2016 Braun went public with her experiences seeking a tubal ligation.

In 2021, Braun was awarded the Marsden Medal by the New Zealand Association of Scientists, in recognition of "her global impact on the development of qualitative empirical methods and for the generosity of spirit she expresses through this work." She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand in 2022.