We are pleased to announce that Professors Peter Whiteford and Allister McGregor have joined us for three months as new Visiting Fellows.

Professor Whiteford is a Professor in the Crawford School of Public Policy at The Australian National University, Canberra. Between 2008 and 2012 he worked at the Social Policy Research Centre at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney. He previously worked as a Principal Administrator in the Directorate of Employment, Labour and Social Affairs of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in Paris. His work at the OECD encompassed pension and welfare policies in OECD countries, Eastern Europe and China. He also worked on child poverty, family assistance policies, and welfare reform.

During his time at the IPR, Professor Whiteford will work with Professor Jane Millar on research which will explore the design of social security benefits, particularly how they can be redesigned to better suit changing work patterns and income risks associated with technological change.

Professor McGregor is Professor of Political Economy in the Department of Politics at the University of Sheffield. Prior to Sheffield, he was at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at the University of Sussex, where he was leader of Vulnerability and Poverty Reduction Team and a member of the Senior Management Group, and taught in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Bath.

While at the IPR, Professor McGregor will work on his forthcoming book ‘The Political Economy of Human Wellbeing in a Globalised World’, and continue his research on an ESRC-funded project, ‘Sustainable Care: Connecting Systems and People’, where he is analysing the political economy of inequalities in the UK social care system.

Professors Whiteford and McGregor hope to run a series of events during their time at the IPR.