Welcome to my webpage! I am a Senior Lecturer in Human Development and Education Policy in the School of Education at the University of Strathclyde and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Previously, I was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the ‘Social Stratification and Education’ strand of the ESRC-funded research centre AQMeN (Applied Quantitative Methods Network) at the University of Edinburgh.

I have attained both a Diplom (equivalent to M.A.) and a Ph.D. in Social Sciences (supervisors Walter Müller and Irena Kogan) at the University of Mannheim, Germany. During my Ph.D., I took part in the graduate training program in empirical and quantitative methods at the Graduate School of Economic and Social Sciences (GESS). I was also involved in several research projects on social inequality in education and the labour market at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES).

My dissertation research focused on the changes in the returns to education on the German labour market in the course of educational expansion and occupational upgrading and restructuring.  This research was fully funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research between 2010 and 2013 (EUR 104,089).

In 2018, I gained funding (together with Edward Sosu) from the ESRC Secondary Data Analysis Initiative for the project ‘Social Inequalities in Educational Attainment: An Investigation into the Mediating Role of School Absenteeism’ (£201,551). This project runs until December 2020. For more information on this project see the section on ‘Research’.

I am a Life Course Research Affiliate at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Children and Families over the Life Course, University of Queensland.

I am on the Associate Board of the BSA journal Sociology (since 2016) and was on the Associate Board of Work, Employment and Society  between 2014 and 2019.