Experts

Carmen is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Economics of the University of Zurich and the Jacobs Centre for Productive Youth Development. She is also a Research Affiliate at the Institute for Fiscal Studies. A public and labour economist, she specialises in the effects of different public policies on youth development and crime. She obtained her PhD in Economics from the University of Warwick in May 2025.

Hillary Vipond is a Visiting Fellow at the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics and a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Transforming Economies team at the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna. Her research examines how technological change reshapes labour markets, social mobility, and regional inequality. Her focus is on 19th century Britain through the Second Industrial Revolution. Her current work develops fine-grained occupational data from individual-level census records

Michael Vlassopoulos is professor of Economics at the University of Southampton and a research fellow of the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Germany. Michael is an applied microeconomist with interests that span a number of areas including labour, education, health, and development economics. Recent research focuses on topics such as racial and ethnic discrimination, mental health, social and educational integration of refugees, network and spillover effects in education.

Stephanie’s research builds on the biomedical as well as social science literature. She investigates the importance of genetics, early life environments, parental investments, and government policy in explaining individuals’ health and behaviour over the life course. She currently holds an ERC Starting Grant (2020-2025) that aims to incorporate genetic data into social science research and study the importance of the nature-nurture interplay in the developmental origins of health and

Maarten Voors is an Associate Professor at the Development Economics Group at Wageningen University. He received his PhD from Wageningen University in 2011 (with honours) and was an Isaac Newton Trust Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Department of Land Economy, University of Cambridge 2011-2013. His main field is development economics, and his research focuses on institutions, (post-conflict) development and behaviour.

Tim is the Pro Vice-Chancellor and Dean of Oxford Brookes Business School. He is an economic geographer, currently co-leading a study examining the impact of Covid-19 on Innovation-led businesses for the Innovation Caucus (ESRC/InnovateUK) and on micro-businesses as part of the Productivity Insights Network (ESRC) of which he is a Co-Director. Tim has also recently edited a book on Productivity and the Pandemic.