Laura is a respected academic and leader within Development Studies, reflected in her senior roles on the governing bodies of the two major disciplinary organisations, DSA and EADI (2014-) and on the advisory board of Manchester University’s Global Development Institute.

She plays a leadership role across multiple areas: wellbeing and poverty measurement; interdisciplinary, cross national and mixed methods research; and rigour, ethics, and research governance (for example, advising on the ESRC’s revised ethical framework). These ideas have been developed through multiple funded projects (over £1M research income from ESRC and DfID), extensive publication (72 peer reviewed journal articles, 10 special issues, 4 books, and 18 peer reviewed book chapters), supervision of 20 PhD students (13 to completion) and teaching of many more.

Her expertise in these areas has been recognised by requests to review the methodologies of the ESRC-DFID Joint scheme for research on poverty alleviation, membership of the BEIS Technical Expert Advisory Group (2018-) and her appointment to the Chair pool of the new UKRI Interdisciplinary Assessment College.

Research

• Using qualitative and mixed methods approaches in research on poverty and evaluation
• Exploring, measuring and understanding subjective well-being in developing countries
• Children and young people
• Ethics in research and evaluation

Currently, Laura's two research foci are: enhancing the quality of cross-national methodologies used to collect qualitative and quantitative data with children and young people in the global South (through Gender and Adolesence Global Evidence (GAGE) programme); and supporting rigorous qualitative and mixed methods evaluations.

Teaching

MSc module 7YYD0028 Advanced Qualitative Methods

PhD supervision 

Laura would be happy to supervise students in any of the following areas:

Children and young people, including education; poverty research and evaluation using qualitative and mixed methods approaches; well-being, with a particular emphasis on more subjective/ psychological aspects and developing measures that reflect local priorities.

Current PhD Students

Sabrina Ahmed (2021) Understanding counter-terrorism policies in global south: a case study of Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh (co-supervisor Lee Jarvis)

Rachel Tough (2022) Life and liminality during COVID-19: An ethnography of pandemic in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam (co-supervisor Irene Skovgaard Smith)