Our PhD students go on to work in a variety of roles; from academia to civil service, charities, NGOs and international organisations. Here are some examples of recent graduates.
Guy Aitchison

Ivica Petrikova

"I am currently a Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Royal Holloway University of London. I am doing research on various issues - food security governance, economic inequality, and the link between populism and development aid. I teach Politics of Development and other development-related courses for both UG and PG."
Markus Kollberg

Markus Kollberg is a Post-Doctoral Researcher at Humboldt University Berlin. He received his PhD from University College London (UCL) in 2023. During his PhD, he was a visiting researcher at Yale University and the University of Vienna. Previously, Markus has worked as a freelance journalist for various media outlets covering German, British and International Politics. He regularly organises and teaches civic education workshops in Germany and Eastern Europe.
Sofia Collignon

Prior to joining Royal Holloway, Sofia was a postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Strathclyde, working as part of the team behind the ESCR-funded Representative Audit of Britain project, part of Parliamentary Candidates UK. During that time, she was also part of the Constitution Unit team. Sofia's main research interests include: a) the study of candidates, elections and parties, b) harassment and intimidation of candidates and c) framing contests in the formation of public opinion. Her research is comparative in nature and she uses quantitative methods. She has published in journals such as Party Politics, West European Politics and Electoral Studies.
Francisco da Costa Marques

In 2017 I took a job at the Minister of Education, working with Human Rights Education and Diversity. Having a direct involvement with HRE policy was a particularly enriching and challenging experience, given the urgency the issue deserves and the opposition it unfortunately faces even within the government. Nowadays, since the beginning of 2019, I am working in the Bolsa Família, a national conditional cash transfer program. The program aims to reduce short-term poverty by monthly hand-outs and to break intergenerational cycles of poverty by mandating health and education requirements.
Besides my career in the civil service, I have been trying to keep in touch with the academia, as an independent researcher. In September 2018 I had a chapter of my PhD thesis published in one of the leading interdisciplinary journals in the field of the social sciences in Brazil, the Revista Brasileira de Ciências Sociais."
Lotte Hargrave

Before joining Manchester, Lotte was the Head of Data Science at the public opinion consultancy Deltapoll. Her work at Deltapoll involved managing and fielding surveys for clients, carrying out research into British politics and public opinion, delivering quantitative presentations and reports, and data analysis and visualisations of all political trackers including Westminster vote intention, economic competence, and leadership approval ratings.
Lotte completed her PhD at UCL in 2022. In her thesis, supervised by Professor Meg Russell, Dr Jack Blumenau and Professor Jennifer Hudson, she examined the dynamic influence of gender stereotypes on politicians’ behaviour and voter attitudes. Her thesis was awarded the 2023 SPP’s “Best Thesis Award”, in addition to the 2023 PSA McDougall Trust Prize for the best dissertations in elections, electoral systems, and representation.
Orly Siow

"I am a Lecturer in the Politics of Gender at Newcastle University. My PhD at UCL analysed the combined effects of political candidates’ race and gender on press coverage of their campaigns in the US and UK. The thesis was awarded SPP’s 2019 Best PhD Dissertation Prize as well as the prestigious 2019 Joni Lovenduski Prize. More widely, I use intersectionality as a theoretical framework to investigate how women's political representation varies along racial, religious, class and partisan lines. Currently, I am analysing minority women's substantive representation in the UK Parliament. I also consult on the advancement of women’s interests through civil society and development programming, and have been funded by UNESCO, Australian Aid, Developmental Leadership Program and Pacific Leadership Program."
Matia Vannoni

Matia Vannoni is a Lecturer in Public Policy in the Department of Political Economy, King's College London. From November 2016 to August 2018, Matia was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Innocenzo Gasparini Institute for Economic Research (IGIER), Bocconi University, where he worked on a project which used advanced text analysis (based on computational linguistics) to study delegation, legislative complexity and economic growth.
Matia completed his PhD at UCL (awarded in February 2017). He also holds a Bachelor’s and Master’s Degree in Political Science from the University of Trento and an MRes from the LSE.
Andreas Juon

Kasim Khorasanee

Julio Montero

Alice Moore

Alice is an Assistant Professor in Public Management and Public Policy in the School of Government at the University of Birmingham. Her research explores how governments can work effectively with external organisations to deliver public services and meet urgent policy challenges. She is working on a project that investigates how different forms of outsourcing and partnerships change the way people engage with public services and their broader attitudes towards the state. She continues to collaborate with colleagues from UCL on projects that investigate how relationships between communities and government are changing through innovative practices in Grimsby, UK, and how municipal governments are collaborating to take advantage of and meet the challenges of rapid technological change.
Alice completed her PhD at UCL in 2024. Her thesis, supervised by Professor Mark Esteve, Dr Colin Provost, and Professor Christian Schuster, explored how competition in public procurement markets shapes the way contracts are managed and how management approaches likewise influence those markets. A chapter from this thesis won the Christopher Pollitt Prize for Best Paper at the 2024 conference of the International Research Society for Public Management.
Ruxandra Serban

Ruxandra Serban is an Associate Lecturer (Teaching) in Democratic and Authoritarian Politics in the Department of Political Science at UCL. From 2019 to 2023, Ruxandra was an LSE Fellow in Qualitative Research Methods in the Department of Methodology at the LSE. Her research agenda focuses on parliamentary procedures and practices in different countries, and her work has been published in comparative politics journals such as Government and Opposition and the British Journal of Politics and International Relations.
Ruxandra was awarded her PhD from UCL in January 2020. Her thesis, supervised by Professor Meg Russell and Professor Alan Renwick, investigated parliamentary mechanisms through which prime ministers are questioned by parliamentarians in different countries, placing the UK’s PMQs in a comparative context for the first time. During her PhD she worked as a Research Assistant at the Constitution Unit. She also holds an MSc in Democracy and Comparative Politics (2014) from UCL.