Serena is currently a Research Associate at the University of Glasgow and her work within the Scottish Centre for Administrative Data Research extends across three research areas involving the analysis of linked administrative data from the benefits and tax systems, as part of the centre's work and social security research:

1. The causal effects of benefit sanctions on health;
2. Health and employment retention in Scotland;
3. Using linked longitudinal administrative data to identify social disadvantage.

Her research interests are in the fields of labour market dynamics, unemployment, poverty, social and health inequalities, with a strong focus on quantitative research methods, comparative cross-national research, large complex longitudinal data and linked administrative data. She is also interested in fertility and family transitions over the life course and gender inequality.

Serena was awarded a DPhil from Nuffield College at the University of Oxford with a doctoral thesis on ‘Women’s employment instability and fertility dynamics: Cross-cohort changes in Italy and Sweden’, where she modelled transitions to first and second birth and labour market transitions following the birth of the first child, by using Weibull frailty models and competing risks models applied to retrospective life history data.

Prior to joining Glasgow and the Scottish Centre for Administrative Data Research, she was involved on a research project on ‘Fertility postponement and recuperation in Britain’ at the ESRC Centre for Population Change at the University of Southampton. This project entailed the application of survival modelling techniques on micro data from two major British cohort studies: the 1958 National Child Development Studies and 1970 British Cohort Study.