I have an eclectic/elastic interest in sociological and demographic questions around family, health & mortality, and social inequality. I am interested in how societies differ in who lives with whom, who gets how much of the good and bad stuff in life, and how (un)fortune in life is related to who your family are.
I am currently involved in the following projects:
In FAMSIZEMATTERS, an ERC-funded project of which I am the PI, we study various questions about the link between family size and (the reproduction of) social inequalities. Patrick Prag, Paula Sheppard, and Zachary van Winkle work on this project as post-doctoral researchers and Florianne Verkroost and Marianne Cunha write their DPhil within this project. Several other students are involved on data harmonization and review papers as Research Assistants.
CritEvents - Critical Life Events and the Dynamics of Inequality - is a Norface ERA-NET funded project, part of DIAL, with partners in Amsterdam (Leopold PI), Lausanne, Florence, and Stockholm. We study how the risk of and vulnerability to critical events - union dissolution and job loss - is socially patterned, how this has changed over time, and which social policies are relevant for these associations. In Oxford, I work with Lewis Anderson (Sociology) and Erzsebet Bukodi (Social Policy and Intervention) on this project.
The Global Family Change project, spearheaded from Penn with partners in Oxford (Nuffield), CED/Barcelona, McGill/Montreal and Bocconi/Milan, explores the complex ways in which families are changing across low and middle-income countries.
Research Areas: Social Inequality, Demography, Population Studies, Family Sociology, Health and Well-Being, Quantitative Methods.
Publications
Teaching
I have had the privilege to work with wonderful students and postdoctoral researchers over the years.
