I worked in politics for a while before I realized that I wanted to study it. My various political jobs in the UK and US left me with frustration about how political systems work and a desire to study them, but most of all a strong motivation for doing policy-relevant research. My PhD from the London School of Economics and Political Science focussed on the intersection of climate, health and labor policies with international trade. This work made me realize how much I like exploring how data is constructed and how its value, quality and status as ‘evidence’ is assessed by political and legal systems. From that point, I focussed a lot more on government solicitation and use of evidence throughout the regulatory process. It took me much longer to find my niche as a social scientist contributing to modeling efforts, but once I realized that I could combine analysis of how data tools and methods are regulated with practical projects that hope to improve future policy and have a real world impact, I was hooked.
I love working in interdisciplinary teams on policy related projects because it highlights how important it is to incorporate social and political science perspectives into modeling efforts. My role is often to inform the assumptions we make about different countries or populations, as well as to think about how products from our efforts might get used in different policy arenas and political systems. As a qualitative researcher, you are often told that your research doesn’t matter very much because it doesn’t fit certain ideas about generalizability and knowledge creation, so discovering that my contributions are valuable and welcomed in these projects has been really validating and exciting. Working alongside government experts from different disciplines allowed me to make a real world impact on responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, for example.