About our contributors

Lorenza Antonucci

Lorenza AntonucciI am a first year PhD student in Social Policy in the School for Policy Studies at Bristol University, where I’m researching youth transitions to adulthood among European graduates, funded by the publisher Policy Press. I have previously studied at the LSE (London), Bocconi University (Milan), Sciences-Po (Paris) and Yonsei University (Seoul) and worked at the EIPA (European Institute for Public Administration) in Maastricht. Because of my passion for comparative European social policy, and due to a personal inclination towards a fluid post-modern life, I tend to spend a consistent part of my time moving around Europe. My main research interest is in the comparison of the welfare sources used by young graduates across Europe. I attempt to connect studies on social mobility and equality in higher education with research on young adulthood, paying attention to the relationship between social needs and social rights. Moreover, I have a specific curiosity in the application of research methods and concepts from psychology to the realm of social policy.

Ben Baumberg

I’m a Lecturer in Sociology and Social Policy at Kent, having studied for my thesis at the London School of Economics and having worked as a researcher for a couple of years before this. I’m interested in a pretty diverse range of things, including:

  • Disability benefits, working conditions and fitness-for-work (which is what my thesis investigates);
  • The relationship between evidence and policy;
  • Public health policy on alcohol and other addictions;
  • Attitudes towards inequality and towards people claiming benefits.

I’m interested in supervising PhD students and collaborating with other researchers on any of these topics – to find out more about me or get in touch, check out http://www.benbaumberg.com

Craig Berry

I am a freelance public policy researcher, specialising in financial and economic issues, and a Lecturer in economic policy at the University of Warwick. I worked previously as a Policy Advisor on Older People and State Pensions at HM Treasury, and as Head of Policy at the International Longevity Centre. I completed my PhD in globalisation and UK trade policy at the University of Sheffield in 2008, and my book Globalisation and Ideology in the UK was published in 2011 by Manchester University Press.

Kendra Bischoff

I am a doctoral student in the Department of Sociology at Stanford University. Before returning to graduate school I worked in the Education Policy Center at the Urban Institute in Washington, DC. My research focuses on the causes and consequences of racial and economic segregation as well as the effect of school context on student outcomes. More recently I have become interested in how and why people select into voluntary programs, specifically in the case of school choice.

Diederik Boertien

I am a third year PhD student in Sociology at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. My two main research interests are social stratification and the dynamics of couple behaviour. Currently, I am working on more micro-oriented questions of how positive income shocks influence the behaviour of couples, with special attention to “gendered” behaviour within couples. At the same time, I investigate more macro-oriented issues that regard the relationships between social structures, inequality and inter-generational mobility.

Colleen Carey

I’m a fifth-year doctoral candidate in Economics at Johns Hopkins University. My main reason for being is the industrial organization of Medicare. I also have been known to make some forays into income dynamics over the business cycle, and I’m working on some ideas about interstate migration. I live in Capitol Hill, where it is common to see men in suits riding bicycles.

Charlotte Cavaille

I am a doctoral candidate in Government (or Political Science as the rest of the world calls it) and Social Policy at Harvard. Before moving to the US, I did most of my undergrad at Sciences-po in Paris.

My interests are broad ranging from the impact of immigration on national politics in Europe and the US to the causes and consequences of income inequality in developed democracies. I have also done research in the UK and France on state policy towards Muslim minorities.

Declan Gaffney

Declan Gaffney has worked in public policy and research since 1997, as an academic, as advisor to regional and national government and as a freelance policy consultant. He has written and published extensively on child poverty, public finance, social security and labour markets, and has published several articles correcting widespread myths about social security over the last eighteen months. As policy advisor on social inclusion at the Greater London Authority he oversaw the GLA’s policy and research agenda on income inequality and poverty, including managing and editing the production of major reports and designing the London childcare affordability programme. The organisations for which he has produced commissioned reports include the British Medical Association, the London Child Poverty Commission and trade unions. He has recently completed a report co-authored with Kate Bell for the Trade Union Congress on the contributory principle in social security.

Bill Gardner


Bill Gardner (Twitter: @Bill_Gardner)  is a psychologist and health services researcher. He is currently a Professor of Pediatrics, Obstetrics & Gynaecology, and Epidemiology & Community Health at Dalhousie University, and he also holds a professorship at the Ohio State University and a position at Nationwide Children’s Hospital and the Center for Ethics and Human Values. Before 2012 he mainly posted (with Paul Kelleher) on the excellent Something Not Unlike Research blog, writing on economic mobility, applied ethics, health inequalities, and cross-national policy comparisons.

Kayleigh Garthwaite


Kayleigh is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Geography, Durham University. She is currently working on various projects related to health inequalities, health and wellbeing and employment for County Durham and Darlington Primary Care Trust. Her research interests focus on the relationship between health and disability, welfare-to-work policies, and self-identity, with a particular interest in spatial disadvantage in terms of worklessness. Kayleigh recently submitted her PhD in Human Geography (2012) from Durham University entitled ‘Incapacitated? Exploring the health and illness narratives of Incapacity Benefit recipients’. Kayleigh previously worked at Teesside University as a Research Assistant on a project for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation which sought to understand the dynamics of poverty and marginal work across the life-course. .

Daniel Goldberg

Daniel S. Goldberg is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Bioethics & Interdisciplinary Studies in the Brody School of Medicine, East Carolina University, USA. He integrates methods drawn primarily from applied ethics, law, public policy, and the history of medicine in a research agenda centered on population health issues. He is primarily interested in the ethical implications of the social determinants of health, chronic illness and public health policy (esp. chronic pain and type II diabetes), and health inequities. He also maintains an active research agenda in the history of medicine.

Timo Idema

Timo IdemaI’m a final year DPhil (PhD) student in Politics at the University of Oxford and for the first half of this year I was a visiting PhD student at Princeton University.

My research focuses on the political economy of higher education and analyses the political consequences of unequal access to higher education. I’m interested in individual preferences over government policies. Moreover, I’m interested in the reasons party policies favour certain groups of voters (those they can win votes from), over others.

Previously I was a lecturer in politics at University College, University of Oxford. In between my academic work I have managed several earthquake response programs for the International Organization for Migration in Indonesia.

Paul Kelleher


Paul Kelleher (Twitter: @Kelleher_) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Medical History & Bioethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and he also holds an appointment in the Philosophy Department. Before becoming a co-editor in 2012, Paul has previously written guest posts on the inequalities on health equity (and other health policy topics) and on the Wisconsin union protests (where he had a front row seat). Before 2012 he mainly posted (with Bill Gardner) on the excellent Something Not Unlike Research blog, writing on economic mobility, applied ethics, health inequalities, and cross-national policy comparisons.

Stewart Lansley

Stewart LansleyStewart Lansley is a visiting fellow at Bristol University and the author of The Cost of Inequality: Why Economic Equality is Essential for Recovery (Gibson Square, 2012). He is also the co-author, with Joanna Mack, of Poor Britain. His personal website is http://www.stewartlansley.co.uk/.

Claire Leigh

Claire LeighClaire is a strategy and policy advisor specialising in the areas of foreign policy and international development. She has recently returned from Rwanda, where she worked as an advisor to the President’s Office on behalf of Tony Blair’s Africa Governance Initiative. Prior to Rwanda, Claire was a senior policy advisor in the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit. She has also worked for the Foreign Office, for UNICEF in New York and as a strategy consultant at Deloitte Consulting. Claire has an MPhil in International Relations from the University of Oxford and a first class BA in History from Cambridge.

Lindsey Macmillan
Lindsey Macmillan
I’m a final year PhD student in Economics at the Centre for Market and Public Organisation (CMPO), University of Bristol. My research interests include intergenerational worklessness, youth unemployment, intergenerational mobility, and educational inequality. Alongside standard academic research, my work has contributed to various commissions including Alan Milburn MP’s Panel for Fair Access to the Professions, David Miliband MP’s Youth Unemployment commission and reports for charities such as JRF and Tomorrow’s People. During my PhD I spent a year as a pre-doc at the Harvard Kennedy School and will begin a post-doc in Sept as the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion (CASE) at the LSE.

Courtney McNamara
Courtney McNamara
Courtney is the founder of Healthy Policies, a blog directing attention to the political determinants of health. She has a Masters in Health Inequalities and Public Policy from the University of Edinburgh, and is continuing her research as a PhD candidate at the University of York (UK), investigating the ways in which trade and social policy interact to influence population health. Prior to her post graduate work, Courtney worked with community-based health equity organizations in Seattle, Washington.

Jenny Morris
Jenny Morris
I used to teach housing and social policy, then became a research consultant and policy analyst in 1990, doing work for a variety of organisations, including central and local government. I worked with the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit to help produce the strategy ‘Improving the Life Chances of Disabled People’ (2005), and was Executive Director of the cross-government Independent Living Strategy published in 2008. I helped to develop the Right to Control with the Office for Disability Issues. Having stopped work a week before the 2010 general election, I’m using my blog jennymorrisnet.blogspot.com to critique current policy developments, with an emphasis on learning from research and history – and am trying not to rant too much. Many of my publications are on the Leeds Disability Research Archive.

Dominique Riviere

I completed my doctorate at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto (OISE/UT) in 2006. My dissertation research explored the ways in which drama pedagogy could be used to transform multicultural education into a critically reflective practice, which made central students’ lived cultural experiences in schools.

I now work as a Research Officer at the Centre for Urban Schooling, OISE/UT, where I continue to investigate issues of equity in urban education, through projects that investigate innovative models of school reform that support the academic and social success of underserved urban students; the impact of community outreach in urban schools; the relationship between culturally responsive pedagogy and student engagement; and the role of public arts education in resisting and/or reinforcing classed, raced, and gendered hierarchies.

I occasionally lecture in multicultural education, critical ethnography, research methods in urban education, and research ethics, and I have had articles published in Westminster Studies in Education (now the International Journal of Research & Method in Education), Research in Drama Education, Race, Ethnicity and Education, and Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education.

Steven Roberts

Steven Roberts

I am a lecturer on Social Policy and Sociology at the University of Kent, having previously been a lecturer in the education department at the University of Southampton. My research interests primarily revolve around the youth stage of the life course, in particular the ways in which social class and gender shape young people’s experience all realms of the transition to adulthood. I’m also more broadly interested in the impact of labour market and higher education policy, both as stand-alone entities but also the ways in which they may or may not represent ‘joined up thinking’. I’m a convenor of the BSA youth study group and a board member of the ESA Youth and Generation Research Network. I also blog on political issues at http://theraggednotebook.wordpress.com/.

Daniel Sage

Daniel SageI am just embarking on PhD study at Stirling University, where I will be examining social and political attitudes about unemployment and benefit recipients. In particular, I am interested in perceptions about the relationship between ‘fairness’ and ‘social security’, as well as political philosophies of welfare from both the Left and the Right.

Brendan Saloner

I am a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania in the Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholars Program. I completed my PhD in health policy at Harvard in 2012. My current research focuses on children’s mental health, substance abuse treatment, racial/ethnic disparities, and public health insurance. I am also interested in ethical issues related to resource allocation, poverty, and the social safety net. I hold an undergraduate degree from UC Berkeley and I have previously worked at the Urban Institute and the RAND Corporation. All views expressed here are my own. More about me: http://www.healthandsocietyscholars.org/1822/16821/284580

Harald Schmidt

Harald SchmidtI am a Lecturer at the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy, and Research Associate at the Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics, both at the University of Pennsylvania. My research interests are centered around personal responsibility for health, public health ethics and fairness in resource allocation. I completed my PhD in Social/Public Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science’s LSE Health, and previously, studied Philosophy at the Universities of Bremen, Oxford and Münster.

Rob de Vries

I’m an Early Career Research Fellow in the Sociology department at the University of Oxford. I’m mainly interested in how people are affected by concerns about their social status; how it colours the way they think, feel, and behave. I try and contribute here regularly, but my addiction to writing excessively long posts keeps getting in the way.