Research
My work focuses on three broad areas that approach a shared question: Who decides what counts as a policy problem, and what counts as the right response?
How inequality is experienced, defined, and made visible across different contexts, including education in Ireland, migration and education in Ethiopia, and disadvantage in the UK. This work focuses on which communities become visible in policy, how problems come to be defined, and how policies reach those they are intended to serve. A common thread is the gap between how systems define problems and how they are experienced in practice.
▶ Selected work
How evidence is produced, governed, and used within large-scale systems, from donor-funded reform programmes in Ethiopia to national policy environments across the UK. This work examines why evidence often struggles to inform decisions, and what institutional conditions support more effective use. It highlights how governance arrangements, funding structures, and political contexts shape what counts as evidence and how it is used.
▶ Selected work
How measurement shapes what is visible in policy and research, and how analytical choices determine what counts as evidence. This work develops and applies methods across contexts, from psychometric validation and culturally grounded measurement to NLP approaches, with a focus on how data and AI systems are increasingly embedded in decision-making. It emphasises the need for methods that are both technically robust and attentive to the assumptions they encode.
▶ Selected work