I am an Associate Professor in Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, Oxford University, where I also serve as Director of the Lemann Foundation Programme for the Public Sector.
My research explores questions relating to the intended and unintended consequences of variations in levels of trust, bias and stereotyping, and how these interplay with government policies. I currently spend most of my research time working on sociopolitical polarisation, gender, and public integrity. Specifically, much of my past two years has been spent theorising and measuring (and seeking interventions to counter) sociopolitical polarisation outside of the United States and Europe, where almost all research to date has been conducted, and then tying this to the under-production of public goods and services. My work on gender and corruption has included writing a large report for the United Nations ("The Time is Now", UNODC), and presenting at the UN General Assembly Special Session against corruption; I am now investigating climate financing as it relates to this topic, and sexual corruption.
I also oversee research on health and education policies and outcomes, government coordination more broadly, as well as work on racial equity, as part of the Lemann Foundation Programme. The Programme produces various materials aimed at practitioners and organises seminars across universities, especially in Brazil.
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, I was pretty much entirely absorbed in building, developing and managing the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker (OxCGRT) project, as the project's co-Principal Investigator from its outset; as well as running and advised on various COVID-19 surveys, including the ICL-YouGov survey; and serving as a member of the Lancet COVID-19 Commission's Mental Health Task Force.
While OxCGRT was primarily a data-provision project, since early 2023, the team has shifted to using the data to answer questions that should better prepare the world for future, related crises. Our research includes, for example, making sense of how patterns in governments’ decision-making towards "vaccine hesitant" people related to vaccine uptake, and exploring the profound importance of different forms of trust in key outcomes.