ÌÇÐÄÊÓƵ

Personal statement

I joined the ÌÇÐÄÊÓƵ in 2023 as Senior Lecturer in Social Policy.

I am Director of Postgraduate Taught Programmes in the Department of Social Work and Social Policy and Programme Lead for the MSc International Social Welfare and Social Policy (Research Methods). I lead the PG-level module Inequalities and Social Policy and the UG-level Social Policy Placement, and I contribute to the teaching of critical quantitative methods across both UG and PG programmes.

I have a PhD in Demography awarded by Sapienza University of Rome (Italy). My substantive and methodological approach has been shaped by formal training in demography and social statistics, work in the official statistics sector, and over a decade of research in interdisciplinary contexts.

I serve as an elected council member of the British Society for Population Studies and as an appointed member of the Population and Migration Expert Advisory Group of the Scottish Government.

My research agenda is driven by a strong motivation to address core issues of population and family change in the developed world, such as low fertility and increasing family diversity, rapid population ageing, and significant migratory flows. Its overarching aim is to investigate the drivers of the components of population change; their implications, both at the macro population level and at the level of individuals, their families, and the societies they belong to; and possible policy solutions. Most importantly, my agenda aspires to uncover the uneven social patterning and consequences of these population trends, and the way they are expressed geographically and at different scales as a result of the complex interaction of population composition, norms, culture, opportunity structures, and policies.

Substantively, my research agenda centres around three themes: inequalities in work–life balance and fertility; intergenerational exchanges of care; and housing inequalities over the life course. I have made distinctive contributions to the theoretical and empirical literature on the role of individual and contextual factors in supporting women’s fertility plans, their labour market participation, and their children’s wellbeing; on intersectional inequalities in caregiving experiences; and on gender, generational, and socio-economic inequalities as both causes and consequences of housing transitions for children, young adults, adult couples, and older adults.

Methodologically, my work uses big data (e.g. longitudinal surveys and linked administrative data) with two distinctive features: being hierarchical, thus allowing the linkage of individuals to their broader context (from their household to their local, national, and supranational context of residence); and being longitudinal, thus following the unfolding of life trajectories over time. Their analysis relies on a varied suite of advanced statistical methods (longitudinal, multi-process, multilevel, spatial, and causal inference techniques), whose purpose is to expose mechanisms and causal pathways, uncover contextual influences at various scales, and enable intersectional analyses.

Ultimately, I aim for my research to have real societal impact by informing policies that can effectively address the injustices that both shape and result from population trends.