Meet the MHCLG Research Policy Fellows

MHCLG will provide the Fellows with mandatory training that enables effective working within the Civil Service.

Stani is active in shaping housing policy in the UK. She is the director of the Affordable Housing Group at UCL and the founder of the Shared Ownership Data Initiative. She has secured a number of research funding grants and is the author of various policy reports on affordable housing. 

Team: Housing Strategy - Institutional Investment & Housing Guarantees 

Project:  

• Feed into the development of the Long-term housing strategy  
• Provide an external perspective on the key interventions in the draft NHDF business case  
• Help us to articulate the need for additional government intervention as a pre-requisite of leveraging additional private capital using data on existing investment flows, and her knowledge of investor priorities’ / investment appetite.  
• Help us to articulate the need for private capital to increase the ability of housing associations to maintain/expand their development pipelines.  
• Support our work to review innovative financing proposals from the private sector 

Saffron is Principal Research Fellow and Director of Social Policy at the Institute for Global Prosperity, where she is Executive Lead for the Prosperity Co-Lab (PROCOL) UK. She is Bartlett Faculty Lead for Public Policy. 
  
Saffron's research focuses on understanding lived experiences of community, shared prosperity, and inequality in urban neighbourhoods, and developing new forms of citizen-led policy-relevant evidence. She leads the Prosperity in east London 2021-2031 Longitudinal Study, using the Citizen Prosperity Index to investigate the prosperity gains from regeneration. Saffron is Co-Chair of the London Prosperity Board, a long-term research and innovation partnership with government, business, community organisations, and citizen scientists, working together to redefine prosperity with communities and change the way decisionmakers think and act for shared prosperity. 

Team: Local Growth Policy and Analysis Team  

Project Aim: to brigade detailed knowledge on LG interventions which work, in which context, to help steer how our evaluation strategy works going forwards.  

Senior Research Fellow for UKCRIC and Postgraduate Fellow for C-DICE, Tom’s research is focused on: 

• The Climate Emergency as a Wicked Problem of problems comprising 3 deeply interdependent wicked problems i) achieving global net zero by 2050, ii) enhancing systemic and societal resilience to the disruptive impacts of at least 1.50C and iii) enhancing global sustainability. 
• The potential role that infrastructure system transformation can play as globally replicable leverage points at the heart of a transformative climate emergency strategy. 
• The importance of outcome-orient infrastructure governance frameworks and decision-making processes closely aligned with current social priorities. 
• The societal and economic value of establishing a Net Resilience Gain culture across the infrastructure industry 

Tom is a passionate advocate for the UKCRIC’s Scientific Missions, and believes that Infrastructure systems can, and must be: 

• Systemic enablers of equitable, inclusive, fair, affordable societally beneficial outcomes 
• Systemically resilient systems that enhance overall societal resilience. 
• Sustainable Net Zero pollution systems that enable the emergence of sustainable, net zero pollution, societies. 
• Underpinned by Fit for Purpose Governance +++structures and business models purposefully aligned with the outcomes and qualities specified above. 

Tom has been an active member of the UK Collaboratorium for Research into Infrastructure and Cities (UKCRIC) since its inception. 

Prior to this Dr Dolan was Centre Co-Ordinator and Senior Research Associate for the International Centre for Infrastructure Futures (ICIF) project. A collaborative, multi-disciplinary, Industry facing project between 6 UK Universities (Cranfield University, University of Bristol, University of Southampton, University of Sussex and University of Brighton) funded by EPSRC and ESRC. 

Additionally Tom, on behalf of UKCRIC, was a founding member of the Net Zero Infrastructure Industry Coalition. Find out more. 

Team:  Resilience and Recovery Directorate, known as RED
Project Descriptions:

• Using a systems approach to understand merging different departmental emergency response structures  
• Infrastructure and community resilience projects as they arise 

Lina is responsible for providing advice on health economics issues to academics and clinicians, who are developing proposals for funding, and undertaking cost-effectiveness analyses for funded projects requiring a health economic evaluation. She is involved in large randomised controlled trials in various disease areas as a health economist conducting economic evaluations and decision analytic modelling. 

Team: Vulnerable People Statistics Team related to Homelessness and Rough Sleeping