Researcher spotlight

Capacity-building is central to the Centre’s activities and is critical for its research staff and postgraduate students. We aim to lead on best practice among our staff with a recognition that advancing their knowledge is important to building capacity among the social science community. The Universities of Oxford, Southampton, St Andrews and Stirling are signatories to The Concordat to Support the Career Development of Researchers, highlighting their commitment to the employment and support for researchers and researcher careers in UK higher education. In line with the Concordat, all staff are provided with opportunities, structured support and time to engage in meaningful professional development.

Dr Joe Butterick is an Early Career Researcher at the University of Southampton, working as a Research Fellow on the project ‘Modelling kinship and quantifying the connections between generations’, led by Dr Jason Hilton. His research interests draw from Evolutionary Game Theory, focusing on how population structures change over time, stemming from the realisation that the methodological approaches used in studying phenotypic evolution are equally applicable to demography. Within Connecting Generations, Joe investigates mathematical problems, particularly matrix models predicting the structure and distribution of population members’ kin.

Through the institutional contribution of its partners, the Centre has so far recruited three funded PhD students working on CG projects, two based at the University of Stirling and one at the University of St Andrews. There are nine affiliate PhD students, seven based at the University of Southampton, and two at the University of St Andrews. We also host visits from researchers and students from other institutions. These colleagues benefit from participation in CG seminars, workshops, and reading groups along with training opportunities across the Connecting Generations networks.

Eve Maynard is an IAS-funded PhD researcher in the Department of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Stirling. She is also working as research assistant on several projects within the University’s Sociology department. Her work examines the use of serious gaming as an effective health and social care approach amongst older adults in the UK. Eve’s PhD is supervised by Connecting Generations members Professor Alison Bowes and Dr Alison Dawson. She is also working alongside Professor Vikki McCall and Professor Alasdair Rutherford as a project officer at their social enterprise ‘Socialudo’.

Vincent Ramos is an Early Career Researcher with a background in economics and public policy. Vincent works with Professor Ann Berrington as Research Fellow at the University of Southampton where his work examines inter-generational co-residence and young adults’ living arrangements. Vincent previously worked at the Philippine Competition Commission, before taking up PhD studies at Humboldt University Berlin. His thesis concerned labour market policies, when individuals enter and exit labour markets, and the links between fertility and employability and the nature of the bargaining.

Dr Andrew Hind has recently passed his PhD viva following his time as a self-funded part-time student in Social Statistics and Demography at the University of Southampton. His research used the ONS internal migration detailed estimates to explore how internal migration shapes population change at local authority district level. Andrew’s interests lie in the associations between education and migration, including family migration driven by school catchment areas, boarding at elite “public schools”, and the residential component of the university system. His supervisors were Connecting Generations members Professor Jakub Bijak and Dr Jason Hilton.

Klara Raiber is an Assistant Professor of family sociology at Radboud University, in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. In autumn 2022, she was a postgraduate visiting researcher at CPC-CG and the Centre for Research on Ageing (CRA) in the Department of Gerontology at the University of Southampton. During her research stay, Klara worked with Professor Maria Evandrou and Professor Jane Falkingham on job satisfaction among informal care givers. Her research focuses on unpaid/informal caregiving, gender, the life course, and family dynamics in older age.