AQMeN - Applied Quantitative Methods Network

I am an early career academic with a passion for social science and a proven proficiency in a range of research methods. My research interests revolve around issues relating to the functioning of labour markets, the welfare state and labour migration flows. My current position is a Research Fellow on an ESRC/Centre for Population Change project on the labour market aspects of East-Central European migration to the UK. This involves responsibility for designing and executing research autonomously, generating research findings and playing a central role in disseminating outputs. I am well suited and drawn to conducting research that is of academic and policy interest. Key findings from my current project relate to the ‘function’ that A8 migrant labour serves and the implications of these patterns and processes on employers’ recruitment and production practices at the bottom end of the UK labour market. In addition to addressing important conceptual questions regarding the functioning of contemporary flexible labour markets, this research is of value to those responsible for formulating and implementing migration and employment and welfare policies.

I have recently successfully completed a PhD on the characteristics, causes and countermeasures to work-welfare cycling. My thesis took an innovative mixed methods approach to shedding light on who is most vulnerable to work-welfare cycling, what processes are responsible for it and what policy can do to negate it. The research involved extensive fieldwork to collect primary data and the manipulation of large-scale and complex longitudinal datasets.

I have also produced research for the Scottish Government as part of the ESRC Internship Scheme, the Government Office for Science and have worked on a previous ESRC project on Scottish migration to and from the South East of England. In these capacities I have been responsible for designing, carrying out, analysing and disseminating high quality research.