Serena is a Research Fellow at the University of Glasgow, and a Co-Investigator and Leadership Group member at the Scottish Centre for Administrative Data Research (SCADR).

Her research focuses on three key areas involving the analysis of linked administrative data from the benefits, tax and health systems:

• Socioeconomic, household and environmental risk factors for COVID-19 in Scotland (Project Lead)
• Health and employment support needs of the Scottish working-age population (Project Co-Lead)
• The causal effects of benefit sanctions on health (Project Co-Lead)

Her research interests are in the field of social and health inequalities, labour market dynamics, unemployment, economic inactivity, disability, social security benefits, welfare reform, and gender inequalities, with a strong focus on quantitative research methods, natural experiments, quasi-experimental designs and causal inference.

Serena holds a DPhil from Nuffield College at the University of Oxford where her doctoral research examined the relationship between women’s employment instability and fertility dynamics using advanced survival modelling techniques applied to cross-national life history data from the UN Commission for Europe (UNECE).

Before joining the University of Glasgow, she was a post-doctoral research scientist at the Vienna University of Economics and Business and, prior to that, at the ESRC Centre for Population Change at the University of Southampton. Her work there focused on fertility postponement and recuperation, analysing microdata from two major British cohort studies: the 1958 National Child Development Studies and 1970 British Cohort Study.