Alex has been awarded a three-year British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship for his project "Complementarities in Children’s Skill Development and Mental Health: The Role of Parental Investments, Health and Relationship Quality"

The 2021 British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship competition was extremely competitive with just over 6% of applicants receiving the award. The abstract for Alex's project is below: 

"The development of a child’s skills is crucial for their long-term health, economic prosperity, and wider family outcomes. Heterogeneity in investments, experiences, and opportunities puts children on different paths from birth. This means that children growing up in households characterized by low child investments, poor parental health and partner abuse will fall behind in multiple aspects, including cognitive and non-cognitive skills, and physical and mental health, limiting their future opportunities.  My research will estimate how skills and health develop in unison and how they interact in order to evaluate policy interventions that can be effective at improving outcomes for disadvantaged children. It is likely that interventions are more productive at certain ages, but it remains unclear whether targeting one dimension can compensate for, or help overcome, deficits in another dimension. For example, can interventions focused on supporting mental health indirectly foster the development of cognitive skills?"

Further information and links to Alex's research can be found on his personal site here.