UCD School of Applied Social Science

Scoil an Léinn Shóisialta Fheidhmeannaigh UCD

Frontiers in Poverty Research Summer School

Speaker Biographies

Alan Barrett (Trinity College Dublin)

Alan Barrett is Project Director with TILDA. He became Project Director in March 2011 and is on secondment from the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI). Alan is an economist by training. He received his PhD from Michigan State University in 1994 and joined the ESRI that year. His main research areas are labour economics and population economics. He has published in journals such as Labour Economics, the Industrial and Labor Relations Review, the British Journal of Industrial Relations, the Journal of Population Economics, the Oxford Review of Economic Policy, the International Migration Review, Population Research and Policy Review, the Economic and Social Review, the National Institute Economic Review and Economics Letters.

David Gordon (University of Bristol)

David Gordon is Professor of Social Justice at the University of Bristol and director of the Townsend Centre for International Poverty Research. He is working with UNICEF on their Global Study of Child Poverty and Disparities, with the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs on youth poverty and hunger and with Eurostat on measuring deprivation in the European Union. He is heading the largest project in history on Poverty and Social Exclusion in the UK.

Richard Layte (Economic & Social Research Institute)

Richard Layte is joint programme coordinator of Health Research at the ESRI. An economic sociologist, he has worked at the ESRI since 1998. His research centres on the way in which education, work and institutional factors such as social welfare systems influence a person’s risk of poverty, disadvantage and poor health and the manner in which these elements interact across the life course. One of the main threads of his work has been the measurement and analysis of poverty, deprivation and social exclusion and he has published widely on these subjects in both international academic journals and the Irish policy literature. His work on disadvantage has led to a number of publications on social class and social mobility in Ireland and how this has changed with Irish social and economic development. His recent work has focused on patterns of health and healthcare.

Madeleine Leonard (Queen’s University Belfast)

Madeleine Leonard is Professor of Sociology at Queen's University Belfast, specialising in the field of the sociology of childhood. She is particularly interested in children’s experiences of growing up in divided societies and has carried out research into children’s experiences of growing up in interface areas in Belfast and in other divided cities such as Nicosia and Jerusalem. Children's participation in paid and unpaid work is a further research interest and she has carried out research into children's paid employment and their participation in household work paying particular attention to their views on the right to work.

David Madden (University College Dublin)

David Madden is currently a Senior Fellow at the Geary Institute and Head of the School of Economics at University College Dublin and is affiliated with the Geary Institute. His main research interests are in the areas of Health Economics and broadly defined ‘human resource’ economics (e.g. poverty, inequality). He is currently researching multidimensional measures of health status, multidimensional poverty, obesity and health polarisation.

Bertrand Maître (Economic & Social Research Institute)

Bertrand Maître is a Research Officer at the Economic and Social Research Institute, Dublin. His main research interests focus on multidimensional approaches to poverty, social exclusion, quality of life as well as the distribution and packaging of household income. Working on these issues throughout various projects, he has gained extensive experience in the use of a wide range of large European and Irish data sets.

Brian Nolan MRIA (University College Dublin)

Brian Nolan is a Senior Fellow at the Geary Institute and Professor of Public Policy in the School of Applied Social Science, UCD and was previously Head of the Social Policy Research Division in the Economic and Social Research Institute. His main areas of research are poverty, income inequality, the economics of social policy, and health economics and inequalities. Recent publications include studies on social inclusion in the EU, equity in health service use, long term trends in top incomes, child poverty, deprivation and multiple disadvantage, tax/welfare reform, and the minimum wage. He has participated in a range of collaborative research networks and projects, and is currently research co-ordinator of the GINI project funded under the EU's FP7 programme, focusing on the economic, social and political impacts of growing inequalities [www.gini-research.org]. He is also PI on a three-year research project funded by the IRCHSS, in which Christopher T. Whelan also participates, on the factors underpinning trends in income inequality over the course of Ireland’s economic boom and into the recession.

Ela Polek (University College Dublin)

Ela Polek has worked on post-doctoral projects analysing data including the British Cohort Studies, National Child Development Study (UK) and the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England in the Institute of Education and Royal Holloway, University of London. She was appointed in January 2011 to the post of Research Fellow/Data Analyst in the UCD Social Science Research Centre to work on the Growing Up in Ireland datasets as part of UCD’s Research Programme on Children and Families.

Thomas Scharf (NUI Galway)

Thomas Scharf is Professor of Social Gerontology and became Director of the Irish Centre for Social Gerontology in 2010. He has research interests in the social policy of ageing and ageing in contrasting types of environment. A particular focus is on issues around social inclusion and exclusion in later life. Prior to joining NUI Galway, he was involved in a project supported by the Economic & Social Research Council’s (UK) Growing Older programme which addressed issues relating to social exclusion and quality of life of older people living in some of England's most deprived urban neighbourhoods. He is currently involved with an IRCHSS/Social Inclusion Division funded project ‘Poverty and the life course: developing material deprivation indicators for a diverse older population in Ireland’.

Mike Tomlinson (Queen’s University Belfast)

Mike Tomlinson is Professor of Social Policy at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests lie in economic and social marginalisation and he has worked in the areas of unemployment, poverty and inequality. He was involved in the first ever Poverty and Social Exclusion study in Northern Ireland, funded by the Office of the First Minister/Deputy First Minister and HM Treasury. More recently he has worked on the mental health impacts of poverty and conflict, including a study of suicide carried out for the Department of Health Social Services and Public Safety (Northern Ireland). He is now working with colleagues across the UK on new surveys of poverty and social exclusion funded by the Economic and Social Research Council.

Dorothy Watson (Economic & Social Research Institute)

Dorothy Watson is an Associate Research Professor at the Economic and Social Research Institute and the Department of Sociology, Trinity College Dublin. She received her Bachelor's degree in Social Science from University College Cork; and her MSc and PhD (both in sociology) from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her areas of interest are Social Inequality, Subjective Well-being, Quality of Life and Survey Methodology. As well as managing several large-scale national surveys (including the ECHP in Ireland and SLÁN 2007), she has worked with international colleagues on a number of projects, including the ESeC consortium to develop and validate a European measure of social class and the EQUALSOC network. Her recent research projects include work on the measurement of poverty in an international context, subjective well-being in Europe, childhood deprivation and multiple disadvantage.

Christopher T. Whelan (University College Dublin)

Christopher T. Whelan is Professor of Sociology at UCD, and was formerly a Research Professor at the Economic and Social Research Institute. He acted as Chair of the Standing Committee for the Social Sciences of the European Science Foundation from 2002-2006 and of the Governing Council of the EU Economic Change, Quality of Life and Social Cohesion (EQUALSOC) Network of Excellence from 2005-2009. He continues to be involved in the latter as an Associate Expert. He is currently Chair of the European Consortium for Sociological Research (ECSR). His research interests include the causes and consequences of poverty and inequality, quality of life and social mobility and inequality of opportunity. He is currently acting as coordinator of the forthcoming ESCR/EQUALSOC EU Network of Excellence/ University of Trento Summer School on Poverty & Social Exclusion involving a number of the leading figures in this area (www.equalsoc.org/270). His book with Brian Nolan on Poverty and Social Exclusion in Europe will be published by Oxford University Press in 2011.