Who we are

Victoria Boydell  is a social anthropologist who has carried out research in the UK, the Philippines, El Salvador, Tanzania, Nigeria, Uganda, Indonesia, Kyrgyzstan and Bosnia Herzegovina. After completing her PhD at the London School of Economics and Political Science (2010), she oversaw global monitoring and reporting for the Fund for Gender Equality at UN Women and held a range of positions at the International Planned Parenthood Federation.  She has over 15 years’ experience in the field of family planning, reproductive health and gender equality. Her research addresses issues such as the social and cultural norms of reproduction, contraceptive use dynamics, discontinuation and provider-client interaction. She has also works on issues of community and patient participation and engagement in sexual and reproductive health programs. She is currently a Lecturer in Women’s Health and the UCL Institute for Women’s Health.

Suzy Buckley joined UCL in 2006, became a Lecturer in 2013 and an Associate Professor in 2021. She is interested in the experiences of parents using donor conception as well as societal attitudes to these families. Suzy has established collaborations with the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) and the Donor Conception Network (DCN). She is currently working on a project exploring the experiences and support networks of solo mothers; defined as those who have made an active decision to embark on parenting alone and have usually used donor sperm to conceive at least one of their children.

Susie Bower-Brown is a Lecturer in Social Psychology at the Thomas Coram Research Unit, UCL. As a qualitative social psychologist, Susie’s research takes an interdisciplinary approach to exploring gender, kinship, LGBTQ+ identities and the experiences of parents and children within diverse family forms. Susie’s PhD research looked at the social experiences of trans and non-binary parents and the school experiences of gender-diverse adolescents. Susie has also explored experiences of genetic and gestational motherhood amongst two-mother families who have used reciprocal IVF, and examined the experiences of cisgender heterosexual elective co-parents. Susie is on the Editorial Board for LGBTQ+ Family: An Interdisciplinary Journal and regularly speaks about gender diversity to academic and non-academic audiences.

Charlotte Faircloth is Associate Professor of Social Science in the UCL Social Research Institute. From sociological and anthropological perspectives, her work has focussed on parenting, gender and reproduction using qualitative and cross-cultural methodologies. This research has explored infant feeding, couple relationships, intergenerational relations and, recently, the impact of coronavirus on family life. She is author of Militant Lactivism? Attachment Parenting and Intensive Mothering in the UK and France (2013) and co-author of Parenting Culture Studies (2014). Her latest book Couples’ Transitions to Parenthood was published in 2021. With Dr Zeynep Gurtin (UCL IfWH), she is co-editor of Conceiving Contemporary Parenthood: Imagining, Achieving and Accounting for Parenthood in New Family Forms as well as co-editor of Parenting in Global Perspective: Negotiating Ideologies of Kinship, Self and Politics (2013) and Feeding Children Inside and Outside the Home: Critical Perspectives (2018). She has served as a convenor of the BSA’s Families and Relationships Study Group, is an affiliate of ReproSoc in Cambridge, and founding member of the Centre for Parenting Culture Studies in Kent. She speaks regularly about her research to international academic audiences as well as media outlets including The Times, The Guardian, BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, PM, Channel 4 News and BBC 2’s Newsnight. She also serves as as Trustee for Coram Family and Childcare.

Alice Goisis is Associate Professor in Demography and Deputy Research Director in the Centre of Longitudinal Studies at UCL Social Research Institute.  Alice’s research interests span a number of substantive areas in social demography and epidemiology. Her research has broadly focused on investigating whether, and if so how, family processes are associated with children and adults’ well-being. For example, in her work she has examined the association between advanced maternal age and child well-being, with a particular focus on whether and how it varies across different groups of the population and time periods. Since February 2019, Alice has been the PI of a European Research Council Starting grant investigating the effects of Medically Assisted Reproduction (such as IVF) on children and adults. In 2020 she was awarded the European Demographer Award. Before joining SRI in 2019, Alice was an Assistant Professorial Research Fellow at the London School of Economics, where she also completed her PhD in Demography/Population Studies in 2014. Further information on Alice’s Website, Twitter @alice_goisis and Iris Profile

 Zeynep Gurtin is a sociologist of reproduction interested in the social, ethical, and relational issues surrounding fertility, infertility, assisted reproductive technologies, and new family forms. Her work brings together analyses of social trends with women’s personal accounts of their expectations, experiences, and pathways to motherhood. Zeynep’s current research projects focus on: motherhood after 40; experiences of patients whose fertility treatment was disrupted due to Covid-19 (in collaboration with the Reproductive Medicine Unit, UCLH); an analysis of 10 years of elective egg freezing with Professor Marcia Inhorn (Yale University); and reproductive anxiety and choices with Dr Charlotte Faircloth (UCL). Zeynep is part of the Changing Infertilities network convened by ReproSoc, University of Cambridge, and was appointed as a Member of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) in 2022. She also writes occasional opinion columns for The Guardian and runs her own Fertility Consultancy, helping individuals and families map out their reproductive options.

Joyce Harper is an author, academic, scientist and educator. She is Professor of Reproductive Science and Head of the Reproductive Science and Society Group. She is a Director of the Embryology and PGD Academy which delivers an online certificate in clinical embryology and founder of Global Women Connected (www.globalwomenconnected.com). Joyce is researching into fertility and reproductive health education, FemTech, IVF add-ons, gamete donation and the menopause. She is founder of Reproductive Health at Work, helping companies ensure that the reproductive health needs of their staff are catered for, co-founder of the UK Fertility Education Initiative and founder of the International Fertility Education Initiative. Her latest book, Your Fertile Years, What you need to know to make informed choices, has been published by JOHN MURRAY PRESS, SHELDON PRESS. She regularly appears in the media. Further information – Professor Joyce Harper.  Follow on Twitter, Instagram, Tiktok and Linkedin – @ProfJoyceHarper

Rebecca Jennings completed her PhD at the University of Manchester, where she taught for a few years before taking up a research fellowship at Macquarie University, Sydney. After moving back to the UK she joined UCL History, where she was a teaching fellow for some years before being appointed lecturer in 2018. Rebecca teaches on the history of gender and sexuality in modern Britain. Her research focuses on twentieth-century British and Australian lesbian history and she is the author of Tomboys and Bachelor Girls: A lesbian history of post-war Britain (2007); A Lesbian History of Britain: Love and sex between women since 1500 (2007); and Unnamed Desires: A Sydney lesbian history (2015). Rebecca is currently completing a monograph arising from her Australian Research Council-funded research into ‘Lesbian Practices of Intimacy in Britain and Australia, 1945-2010’, which traces lesbian relationship models and parenting practices in post-war Britain and Australia.

Susie Kilshaw is Principal Research Fellow in the Department of Anthropology. Her work focuses on reproductive disruptions, pregnancy endings and miscarriage. Her interest in impaired parenthood and compromised reproduction was piqued during her PhD work on Gulf War Syndrome (GWS) and her book Impotent Warriors: Gulf War Syndrome, Vulnerability and Masculinity includes a discussion of these themes. Her more recent work has explored how cultural context impacts the way pregnancy loss is framed, articulated, and experienced in Qatar and the UK. This research led to the book Pregnancy and Miscarriage in Qatar: Women, reproduction and the state, published by Bloomsbury in 2020, and Navigating Miscarriage: Social, Medical and Conceptual Perspectives, which was co-edited with Katie Borg and published by Berghahn in 2020.  She was awarded a Wellcome Trust University Award to continue her research into pregnancy endings. This ongoing project investigates what is left behind when a pregnancy ends and asks how these materials are perceived and handled in different contexts, such as clinics, homes, burial sites, crematoria; and by different people, such as women, their families, doctors, nurses and crematoria staff. For this work she has been based at an NHS Early Pregnancy Assessment Unit and its associated gynaecology and surgical wards. Susie has previously worked for the NHS as a clinically applied medical anthropologist. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/anthropology/people/susie-kilshaw

Alina Pelikh Alina is a Research Fellow in Demography at the UCL Centre for Longitudinal Studies and was recently awarded an Understanding Society Fellowship to investigate the role of early adolescent experiences in explaining differences in school-to-work trajectories between siblings. Her research interests include a range of topics across social demography and reproductive epidemiology, including life course, families and fertility, transition to adulthood, mental health, and residential mobility. Alina is currently working on ERC Grant to study the effects of Medically Assisted Reproduction (MAR) on children and adults (MARTE). She investigates adverse maternal and birth outcomes associated with MAR (i.e., risk of low birth weight and prematurity) and also examines the effects of fertility treatments on partnership stability and maternal mental health using population register data from Utah and Finland. Some of her previous projects included investigating mothers’ and fathers’ employment trajectories and occupational outcomes in the UK (project in partnership with the Government Equalities Office); exploring the impact of childcare prices on women’s labour market outcomes (project with the Coram Family and Childcare Trust). Alina is the co-host and founder of the official IOE podcast for early career academics, Academia et al. (2021). Alina is keen on wider dissemination of her research findings. Her work was covered in multiple media outlets, including BBC Worklife, The Times, ITV News, The Medical News.

Alyce Raybould Alyce is Research Fellow and Survey Manager at the Centre for Longitudinal Studies. She currently works as part of the Early Life Cohort Feasibility Study team, who are aiming to test the feasibility of conducting a representative UK birth cohort in 2023. Prior to joining UCL, she completed a PhD in Demography at LSHTM focusing on the effect of household division of labour on childbearing intentions, and fulfilment of those intentions in high income countries. Her current research interests include how to improve the assessment and measurement of reproductive decision-making, and determinants of fertility in high-income countries. Twitter: @AlyceRaybould

Doctoral Students

Nina Charalambous is a doctoral researcher within the Education, Practice and Society department at the Institute of Education. Her PhD research aims to explore the impact of motherhood on the careers of women in the primary education profession. Nina has a BA in Sociology from the University of Nottingham, a PGCE in Primary Education from the IOE and a MA in Sociology of Education from the IOE. She has worked for a number of years in London schools as a teacher, assistant headteacher and SENCO.

Ellen Davenport-Pleasance: Ellen is a PhD student at the Thomas Coram Research Unit within the Institute for Education, researching relationships and wellbeing within families with bi+ mothers through a mixed-method study. Ellen has a BA and MPhil in Psychology from the University of Cambridge, and her current research is a continuation of her qualitative MPhil research into the experiences of bi+ mothers, with a focus on how bi+ mothers talked to their children about bisexuality. Ellen has experience supervising undergraduates at the University of Cambridge, on a paper called “The Family”, and will begin teaching two modules (“Social Psychology” and “Families in Society”) at UCL as a Postgraduate Teaching Assistant this year. Ellen is also a member of the leadership team of the Bisexual Research Group, an international group that aims to facilitate the sharing of knowledge relating to bisexual+ research by connecting researchers across the world and across disciplinary fields.

Xuerui Hu is a PhD student at the UCL Social Research Institute. She is interested in reproduction, family transformation, parenting cultures and modernity in contemporary China. She is exploring the reproductive experiences of lesbians in mainland China, trying to understand how various changes in cultural, social, political and economic processes and institutions shape lesbians’ ideas and practices of reproduction. The study might contribute to literature by engaging the discussion on reproduction (both giving birth to and bringing up the next generation) with the scholarship on family transformation in modern society and state-led modernisation. Follow on Twitter-@xueruihu  Xuerui Hu – Iris Profile

Maria Larrain is a PhD student in medical anthropology at the Department of Anthropology. She is researching the maternal experience of infant feeding and tongue-tie in a private setting, an NHS setting, and on social media. She is unpacking tongue-tie as seen through the lens of healthcare professionals and parents alike. She is a practising osteopath in London and a former clinical tutor of postgraduate osteopaths training in paediatric care.

Victoria Pratt is a PhD student at the Thomas Coram Research Unit, researching solo mothers’ experiences of returning to work following maternity leave. She is a Senior Lecturer in Child Development at Oxford Brookes University and a former primary school teacher.