Professor Linda McKie has been the Executive Dean of the Faculty of Social Science and Public Policy (SSPP) since January 2022. She is also a Professor of Social and Public Policy in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine. Since 2024, she has also been serving as a co-chair of the university's Investment Sub-Committee.

SSPP comprises four schools: Education, Communication and Society; Global Affairs; Politics and Economics; and Security Studies; as well as the Policy Institute. Within the School of Security Studies is the Department of Defence Studies, which oversees our unique academic-military partnership with the UK Defence Academy. As of February 2025, the faculty has a head count of approximately 1,100 staff members and over 8,000 students.

Linda leads a team of Vice Deans and Heads of School, who are internationally recognised leaders in their respective fields. Further details about SSPP’s senior leadership team can be found here. SSPP offers a range of undergraduate programmes, postgraduate taught and research opportunities, and professional education. Linda’s leadership approach emphasises horizontal engagement with leaders, staff, and students, fostering an environment of trust, respect, and fairness, with iterative learning from daily operations to long-term projects.

Previously, Linda served as Dean and Head of the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh from 2017. Before that, she was Head of the School of Applied Social Sciences at Durham University. She earned her Ph.D. in Sociology from Durham University in 1989. Her career is documented in more detail in an interview available here.

In 2004, Linda was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (FAcSS), and in 2010, she was appointed a member of the Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2014 Sub-panel 23: Sociology. Between 2007 and 2014, she was part of the evaluation panels commissioned by the Greek Government to review research centres in Historical, Mediterranean, and Social Sciences. Linda was also a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Hanken School of Economics in Helsinki for six years until 2010.

Between 2012 and 2021, she chaired various funding award panels for the Academy of Finland. She has also contributed to funding evaluations for several EU initiatives (COST, Horizon 2020, and Marie Curie), as well as the Irish and Norwegian Research Councils.

Research Foci

• Working lives with a focus on the over fifties and an ageing society/workforce
• Older workers and the care sector
• Evidence and policy analysis

Linda has been the principal investigator or a member of 35 project teams, collaborating across multiple countries. Since joining King’s, she has worked on three large research council-funded projects and two internally funded impact projects.

Large Projects

Linda led the UK team for the Transatlantic Platform Project, En Route to Recovery, which examined care work following the COVID-19 pandemic. The project involved teams from Canada, Finland, and South Africa. Completed in October 2024, the research culminated in an edited book, "Vulnerabilities in Paid Care Work", published by Policy Press in January 2025.

Linda was Principal Investigator on the UKRI project “Healthier working lives (HWL) and ageing for residential care workers: developing careers, enhancing continuity, promoting wellbeing” (£1.4 million), which concluded in February 2024.

She is also a Co-Investigator on the UKRI project "Beyond the 10,000 Steps: Managing Less Visible Aspects of Healthy Ageing at Work (SHAW)" (£1.9 million), completed in February 2024.

Both HWL and SHAW projects were part of the Healthy Ageing Programme.

Impact

Two impact projects have emerged from these three major research projects:

• Care Stories: This website, developed using ethnographic data from the HWL project, provides resources for workers and employers. By amplifying the voices of staff, this impact project highlights key factors that contribute to increased job satisfaction and improved retention rates, particularly among older workers.

• Time for Quality Care: Running throughout spring and summer 2025, this initiative will share findings from the HWL and SHAW projects with care workers, business owners, and policymakers in London and the Home Counties. The project aims to demonstrate how qualitative data can inform workplace and local government policy and practice.

From 2025, Linda will expand her pilot work on AI-driven health and wellbeing support for care workers.

Further Details

 See Linda's research profile