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

I study how and why family socioeconomic status shapes individuals’ development and outcomes at various stages of the life course (from childhood over adolescence to adulthood). My research appears in Sociological Science, Child Development, Sociology, British Journal of Sociology, European Sociological Review or Social Science Research.

I have attained both a Diplom (equivalent to M.A.) and a Ph.D. in Social Sciences (supervisors Prof Walter Müller and Prof 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).

I am currently leading a project on ‘Social Inequalities in Educational Attainment: An Investigation into the Mediating Role of School Absenteeism’  funded by ESRC Secondary Data Analysis Initiative (£201,551). This project runs until March 2022. For more information on this project see the section on ‘Research’.