Dr Laura Sochas
Job Title
Chancellor's Fellow and Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow
Room number
G02Building (Address)
22 George SquareStreet (Address)
22 George SquareCity (Address)
EdinburghResearch interests
Research interests
My research focuses on how power, institutions, and social policies affect health inequalities, using mixed methods. I take a critical feminist stance, engaging with theories such as intersectionality and Reproductive Justice. My work has been published in high-impact journals such as Social Science & Medicine, Socio-Economic Review, Demography, Health Policy & Planning, and BMJ Global Health.
*** PHD SUPERVISION *** I am particularly interested in supervising PhD students taking a critical, feminist or anti-racist approach to studying social policy, international development/global health policy, or health outcomes, using *quantitative* or mixed methods, in the Global North or the Global South.
As a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, I am leading a project titled: “Policing Reproduction via Migration and Family Policies: Stress, Stigma & Health”. Through this research, I am exploring how migration and family policies in Europe affect parents’ rights to have children and to parent with dignity, and how this affects their health, formulating a quantitative approach to Reproductive Justice. In 2025, I will be transitioning to a Chancellor's Fellow role with the University of Edinburgh.
I have previously published on topics such as: collective bargaining and health inequalities; modelling the indirect mortality effects of epidemics; how health service environments and health facility rules affect maternal health inequalities; how interviewers affect the likelihood of reporting an abortion; researching intersectionality using quantitative and mixed methods.
Background
I obtained my PhD in Demography from the Department of Social Policy at LSE (2020), before doing a postdoc at the University of Oxford, in the Department of Social Policy and Intervention (2020-2023). I hold an MSc in Social Research Methods (2016) and a Masters in Public Administration (2011) from LSE, as well as a BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (2007) from the University of Oxford. Prior to my PhD, I worked as a consultant on public health programmes in African and South Asian countries, for clients such as UKAID, the Gates Foundation, WHO and UNFPA.