IOE academics named as finalists for ESRC’s 2022 Celebrating Impact Prize

The ESRC Celebrating Impact Prize is an annual opportunity to recognise the success of ESRC-funded researchers in achieving and enabling outstanding economic or societal impact from their research.  

Heather Joshi, now Emeritus Professor of Economic and Developmental Demography at IOE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society, is shortlisted in the John Hills Impact Prize category. The new category will recognise a social scientist who has demonstrated positive, lasting and profound changes to a significant number of people’s quality of life, which ESRC have launched to mark the 10th year of the awards.  

Through her work, Professor Joshi has informed policy by documenting generational change in social and gender inequality. Her research has included investigations into gender pay gaps in the labour market, the impact of childrearing on women's lifetime earnings, and effects of maternal employment on child-bearing and child development.  

From 2003 to 2010 she was the Director of IOE's Centre for Longitudinal Studies, home to four of the UK’s internationally renowned cohort studies. She was the founding director of the Millenium Cohort Study (MCS) which currently follows the lives of around 19,000 young people. Her work to create and provide access to longitudinal datasets has brought significant benefits to policymakers, practitioners, and academic research. 

Lorraine Dearden, Professor of Economics and Social Statistics, is shortlisted in a team application with Professor Bruce Chapman (Australian National University), for their work on Higher Education funding issues and its influence on funding design. Professor Dearden’s graduate income forecasting has assisted governments around the world to rethink the design of Higher Education student loans and is providing the foundations for more efficient, equitable student loan reforms.  

By working with student loan officials in Columbia, Professor Dearden’s analysis demonstrated that income-contingent loans would very significantly improve repayments, benefitting the government, while also protecting all borrowers from default. Consequently, legislation was passed to introduce income-contingent loans in the country from 2022. 

Other researchers shortlisted in the Prize’s tenth year includes the UCL team behind the COVID-19 Social Study led by Dr Daisy Fancourt (UCL Institute of Epidemiology and Health Care). The winners will be announced in an awards ceremony on 2 November 2022 as part of the ESRC Festival of Social Science. 

Links 

• View all ESRC Celebrating Impact Prize 2022 finalists 
• Making student loan repayments fairer and more affordable 
• Q&A with Professor Lorraine Dearden 
• View Professor Heather Joshi’s research profile 
• Centre for Global Higher Education 
• Centre for Longitudinal Studies 
• UCL Social Research Institute 

Image: Adobe Stock / ASDF.