Our Early Career Impact Awards 2024 recipients
Beth Armstrong
Food and You 2 Research Fellow, Food Standards Agency
Beth joined University of Sheffield in 2019 and has been working with the Food Standards Agency (FSA) as a Research Fellow since 2020. She has made significant positive contributions to FSA’s social research which led to her fellowship being extended for two further years in 2022. Beth has played an instrumental role in delivering FSA’s official statistic Food and You 2 survey which transitioned to push-to-web in 2020. Most notably, she has contributed to the survey design by championing the inclusion of new topics including social supermarkets which is featuring in the 2024 UK Food Security Report as it is the only government survey collecting this data. She regularly supports users across government, academia and NGOs through delivering data tutorials and one-to-one sessions. Her dedication has resulted in a series of academic journal articles being produced as well as funding bids with Wellcome and NERC.
Joanna Barry
Insight Manager,
NHS England
Joanna’s career in social research began at Ipsos, where she worked on both qualitative and quantitative projects, including the GP Patient Survey, NHS Patient Survey Programme, and the Integrated Care Experience Survey. This led her to her current role as an Insight Manager in NHS England’s Insight and Voice team, where she recently managed the design and implementation of the first national survey of people living with type 1 and type 2 diabetes. This involved developing the sampling approach, questionnaire and materials, and methodology. Joanna currently manages the National Cancer Patient Experience Survey and set-up of the future contract, with a focus on methods and questionnaire redevelopment to address challenges of falling response rate, increasing postage costs and non-response bias.
Rebecca Light
Senior Researcher
National Centre for Social Research (NatCen)
Rebecca Light has worked at the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen) for the past 5 years in the Health and Biomedical team and more recently in the Longitudinal Surveys team. She has worked on several large-scale surveys including the Health Survey for England (HSE), the National Study of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (Natsal) and the Education and Outcomes Panel Study B (EOPS-B) also known as Five To Twelve. She is a senior member of the team responsible for the set-up of these surveys (e.g. programming, training interviewers and biomedical fieldworkers and the creation of internal and public facing documents and websites), monitoring fieldwork response, liaising with clients and co-leading on the data management (e.g. deriving variables, checking data, quality assuring data and others work, liaising with clients on requirements and queries). Most recently Rebecca has begun a secondment at UCL where she will be working with the Natsal data to contribute to initial analysis towards the methods and paper outputs.
Tom Luckwell
Associate Director, Verian
Tom started his career in social research three years ago when he began working at Verian as a Research Executive. Over the past three years, Tom has received three promotions and has earnt a place as one of Verian UK’s go-tos for survey design. High-profile projects where Tom led the survey design include the ‘Public Attitudes to AI Survey’ for the Alan Turing and Ada Lovelace Institutes and the ‘National Victim Experience Survey’ for the Home Office. In addition to survey design, Tom routinely leads on cognitive testing and contributes to survey design training at Verian. He has a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology and a Masters in Sociology. Between finishing his BA and starting his MA, Tom spent his twenties pursuing a career as a performer and theatre maker.
Nathan Reece
Survey Project Manager, European Social Survey ERIC, City St Georges, University of London
Nathan graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics from Bard College in 2015. He spent 4 years in Beirut, Lebanon working as a Statistician for UNESCWA, with a focus on demographic and social statistics within the Arab region. After completing an MSc in Social Research Methods at the LSE Department of Methodology, he started working for the European Social Survey (ESS) at City, University of London. Throughout Nathan’s educational and working experience, he has cultivated an obsessive interest and connection to survey methodology. At the ESS, Nathan’s primary focus is on the upcoming mode switch from face-to-face interviewing to survey administration via self-completion web and paper questionnaires.
Matt Shapley
Senior Research Executive, Ipsos
Matt is a Senior Research Executive in the Probability Surveys Unit at Ipsos. Graduating with a BA in Politics from Nottingham University and an MSc in Survey Methods for Social Research from Essex University, his journey in survey research started in 2015 as an Ipsos interviewer. In the summer of 2016, toward the conclusion of his Masters, he interned at the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen). This culminated in experimentation with online cognitive interviewing, which he wrote as his dissertation and presented at the 2017 ESRA conference. After detouring into academia and the civil service, where he continued his passion for statistics, he returned to survey research at Ipsos in 2021. There, he primarily works on large-scale, random probability surveys.
Michalina Siemiatkowska
Senior Research Officer, Office for National Statistics
Michalina is an accomplished senior social researcher, with a passion for data analysis. With a BSc in Psychology and an MSc in Research Methods gained from the University of Southampton, Michalina brings vast experience to her role at the Office for National Statistics (ONS). Currently serving as a Senior Research Officer on the Survey Design and Sampling team, she has led impactful projects that have contributed to improving the efficiency of the Transformed Labour Force Survey field operation. Previously, Michalina worked on the 2021 Census and the Covid Infection Survey, where she has demonstrated her leadership and problem-solving skills, consequently earning her a spot on the ONS High Potential Programme.