The Data Impact Fellows programme is designed to support the use of UK Data Service data and resources by new generations of researchers and analysts working in the academic sector and, for the first time, in UK registered charities.
This year’s applications for the 2019 round of the Data Impact Fellows programme were of extremely high quality, making the judges‘ job extremely difficult.
After much deliberation, the judges decided to make six full Fellowship awards and also two highly commended awards.
Meet the UK Data Service Data Impact Fellows 2019-2021
Anne Alarilla
Data and Research Analyst in the Cancer Intelligence Team at Cancer Research UK
Anne primarily explores smoking, overweight and obesity prevalence in the UK and individual nations of the UK with a particular focus on prevalence trends. Anne’s research uses data from Annual Population Survey, Opinions and Lifestyle Survey, Health Survey for England, Scottish Health Survey, Health Survey Northern Ireland, National Survey for Wales and Welsh Health Survey. She previously presented her work on “Smoking Prevalence Trends by Occupational Groups in England” at the UK Data Service Health Studies User Conference 2018. Anne has created a tool to accumulate smoking, overweight and obesity prevalence statistics from individual nations’ health surveys in one central place.
Janet Bowstead
Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Royal Holloway, University of London
Janet Bowstead is a feminist academic with a professional background in frontline, policy and coordination work on violence against women. Her research is interdisciplinary in nature, across geography, social policy and sociology; integrating quantitative, spatial, qualitative and creative methods. She has research articles in journals in geography and wider social sciences and social policy. Janet is currently a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London. Special Licence Access to Supporting People Client Records and Outcomes is central to Janet’s research. Such administrative data from service records and monitoring enables her to research women’s help-seeking, analysing the geographies of accessing services due to domestic violence and generating associations and patterns.
Her research draws on theory, concepts and analysis techniques from migration research and applies them to the internal migration journeys of women within the UK escaping domestic violence (www.womensjourneyscapes.net). Participatory photography with women who have relocated due to domestic abuse explores their practical, geographical and emotional journeys towards safety and freedom.
Stuart Campbell
Research Associate at University College London
Stuart is a Research Associate in the Department of Social Science at the UCL Institute of Education. He has an MSc in Economics from the University of Sussex, and a PhD in the Economics of Education from the UCL Institute of Education. His PhD was funded by an ESRC Advanced Quantitative Methods scholarship. Stuart previously worked as a Research Associate in Economics at the University of Sheffield and fulfilled a shorter research contract as a Research Assistant at the Institute for Fiscal Studies. He is a fellow of the Global Labor Organization.
During his doctoral studies, Stuart completed an ESRC Internship in Migration and Border Analysis at the Home Office, and was employed as a Postgraduate Teaching Assistant in Economics at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies. He also gave lectures on the Economics of Identity and the Economics of Sport while working as a researcher at the University of Sheffield. In his current role, Stuart has lectured and led tutorials at both the undergraduate and postgraduate level, on a range of courses in economics and applied statistics, and has also supervised postgraduate research.
Stuart has presented his work at invited seminars and at a number of international conferences in population and labour economics, as well as at the Royal Economic Society annual conference in the UK. He has worked with a wide range of data supplied by the UK Data Service, including the Labour Force Survey, the Millennium Cohort Study, Next Steps, the British Household Panel Survey, and Understanding Society.
David Kingman
Senior Researcher at the Intergenerational Foundation
David is a quantitative senior researcher and data analyst with a wide range of interests including population demography, economics, inequality, housing, pensions, higher education, political representation and wellbeing in his current role as Senior Researcher at the Intergenerational Foundation (IF). The IF is a non-party-political think tank which researches intergenerational fairness. David holds a BA Geography degree with First-class honours and an MSc with Distinction in Spatial Planning from UCL. He is responsible for day-to-day management of IF’s research projects, including research design, accessing relevant data sources, undertaking data analysis and producing insightful, newsworthy research reports.
David is proficient in a wide array of statistical research methods, with extensive experience of using the R programming language, Microsoft Excel and Quantum GIS to derive insights from datasets and produce high-impact data visualisations. He has experience of working with data from most of the UK’s major household surveys and using Big Data sources. He produces a wide range of publications, including research reports, submissions to public consultations, internal briefings and blog posts for a wide variety of both expert and non-expert audiences, including politicians, policy-makers, IF colleagues, the media and the general public.
David is frequently invited to present IF’s work at conferences, seminars and roundtable discussions, and has appeared as an expert witness before select committees in both Houses of Parliament, at All-Party Parliamentary Groups and before the Low Pay Commission on two occasions. In June 2018, he addressed a large audience at the European Parliament as part of the 2018 European Youth Event.
Christian Reynolds
Knowledge Exchange Research Fellow at the University of Sheffield, and Technical Specialist and Analyst for the Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP)
Christian Reynolds is a Knowledge Exchange Research Fellow (N8 AgriFood project) at the Department of Geography, University of Sheffield, and an adjunct Research Fellow at the Barbara Hardy Institute for Sustainable Environments and Technologies, University of South Australia. Christian is also on secondment to WRAP as Technical specialist in international food sustainability. In this role, Christian is working on integrating healthy sustainable eating and food waste reduction messages. Christian’s research examines the economic and environmental impacts of food consumption; with focus upon sustainable, healthy and affordable diets and food waste.
Christian is the leader of the AHRC US-UK Food Digital Scholarship Network, and the Champion for Improved Nutrition and Consumer Behaviours of the STFC Food Network+. Through these roles Christian engages with researchers, and institutions throughout the UK and US in harnessing the research capabilities of the humanities, data science, physics and space science to address agri-food and sustainability issues. Through these interdisciplinary communities Christian is currently working on research including using citizen science to measure perceptions around food and sustainability; text mining of food texts and cookbooks to understand the environmental and health impacts of recipes over time, and using “Hack” events to engage interdisciplinary researchers with novel food and sustainability datasets, including the National Diet and Nutrition Survey.
Christian was previously a Public Health Research Fellow at the Rowett Institute of Nutrition and Health, University of Aberdeen, where he researched healthy sustainable diets for high and low income groups using linear programming and agent based modelling. He has experience in economic input-output, material flow and environmental (Life Cycle Analysis) modelling and has published peer reviewed articles on these topics.
Bozena Wielgoszewska
Research Associate at the Centre for Longitudinal Studies
Bozena primarily works on a project which aims at harmonisation of the income and earnings data across three cohort studies: National Child Development Study (NCDS), 1970 British Cohort Study (BCS70), and the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS). In addition to that, she is involved in a project which investigates what the language used in essays written by the participants of the NCDS when they were age 11 can tell us about their future social mobility.
Bozena was awarded a PhD from the University of Edinburgh, which was supported by the Skills Development Scotland (SDS) and Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) collaborative funding programme. Her PhD thesis is entitled “Understanding University Graduates’ Social Mobility Trajectories: How Does the Route affect the Outcome?”. In this project, she analysed economic activity histories of a sample of graduates from the 1970 British Cohort Study, mapping the patterns of change in their employment and social class over time. She engaged with SDS regularly, throughout the studentships, where she also completed an internship during which she worked on a project evaluating the long-term outcomes of Modern Apprenticeships in Scotland.
Prior to undertaking PhD research, she completed an MSc in Statistics at KU Leuven in Belgium. The course covered the theoretical background of statistics, the wide range of methods used to analyse and visualise data and a substantial amount of practical work with datasets, using a range of software packages. While in Belgium, Bozena also worked in a multisensory market research consultancy.
Previously, having obtained a degree in BSc (Hons) Business Economics with Accounting from Plymouth University, Bozena worked as a Research Assistant at this institution where she developed an interest in and passion for data and data analysis, which she has been consistently and persistently developing since.
Highly commended
Ben Brindle
PhD student as part of the South Coast DTP, at the University of Brighton
Ben is in the first year of his economics PhD at the University of Brighton’s Business School. His research, which is funded by the ESRC’s South Coast DTP, examines how the labour market responds to immigration-induced supply shocks; through either technology mix changes, where firms alter their production techniques or output mix changes, where firms that use the abundant labour type intensively grow in size. To do this, he uses the Quarterly Labour Force Survey and the Annual Respondent’s Database.
Ben’s research examines how immigration has impacted the UK labour market since 1998. Given that the current immigration debate, both in the UK and beyond, is characterised by misinformation, Ben’s hope is that he can provide clarity as to how the labour market responds to immigration-induced supply shocks. This, however, requires that his results – and those produced by other researchers – are heard by policy makers and, crucially, the general public. Ben’s aim is to bridge this divide by engaging with these groups.
Ben holds an MSc in Social Research Methods from the University of Southampton, an interdisciplinary masters that equipped him with an in-depth knowledge of both the myriad research methodologies at his disposal, and an understanding of when their usage is most appropriate. Prior to this, Ben completed a BSc in Business Management with Economics at the University of Brighton, where he was the best performing final year on the Business Management pathway.
Alongside Ben’s studies he teach seminars in a variety of economics modules at the University of Brighton, where he focuses on the role that economic theory, and economic data, can play in producing new knowledge and insights that leads to positive change in our daily lives. He is also a co-editor of the South Coast DTP academic blog, and has previously written for the Business and Daily Registers and Letters sections of The Times.
James Cockett
Research Economist at the Institute for Employment Studies
James is a Research Economist at the Institute for Employment Studies (IES), a research institute based in Brighton. He joined IES in July 2017 after completing his first degree at the University of Sussex. James’ research interests include education (especially higher education) and the barriers facing disadvantaged groups in the labour market.
Since starting at IES, James has worked with a variety of administrative data, nationally representative survey data, bespoke survey data and management information systems. James is confident in applying a range of econometric and statistical techniques and is a user of several quantitative software packages including Stata. James works within a small team of economists within a wider organisation of mainly mixed methods and qualitative researchers carrying out research for UK public policy clients, European bodies and employers, undertaking analyses in the fields of employment, labour markets, health, and social policy. Recent work includes econometric analysis of progression in employment for the JPMorgan Chase Foundation and econometric modelling of the legal sector workforce for the Law Society of England and Wales.
James has worked on a number of projects using methods designed to identify the causal impact of policy interventions. These have included a project for the European Commission which estimated the impact of a policy to reduce long-term unemployment in Catalonia.
James is currently evaluating the effect of the introduction of the National Living Wage (NLW) and changes in the National Minimum Wage (NMW) on employment and hours. The project involves analysis of the Labour Force Survey and the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, funded by the Low Pay Commission. James is also analysing a survey of EU staff in Higher Education for the Department for Education, looking at career trajectories and institutional strategies in response to the UK’s decision to leave the European Union.
The Fellows meet next week and we look forward to supporting them on their way.
Watch out for blog posts from each of our new Data Impact Fellows during next week on the Data Impact Blog. You can also follow the Data Impact Fellows’ progress on @UKDSImpact.