Looking back over my career, I realise that although the topics I have studied have evolved, the question that has motivated my research has remained remarkably constant.
How do children and young people develop their capabilities in contexts of adversity, and what enables them not only to survive but to flourish?
When I began my career, I was interested in understanding why children growing up in similar economic circumstances often experienced very different life trajectories. Traditional economic models explained part of this variation through differences in income, education or labour markets. Yet they left important questions unanswered. Why did some young people maintain ambitious educational aspirations despite growing up in poverty while others did not? Why did children exposed to similar opportunities accumulate different cognitive and socio-emotional skills? Why did some communities recover from shocks while others experienced persistent disadvantage?
These questions led me to recognise that human development is a dynamic process that cannot be understood by studying isolated outcomes. Education, health, mental wellbeing, family relationships, aspirations and economic opportunities are deeply interconnected, and they evolve throughout the life course. Understanding these interactions became the central focus of my research.
My early work explored how aspirations, psychosocial competencies, gender norms and family environments shape educational choices and adolescent development. I became increasingly interested in the production of human capital—not simply as an economic concept, but as the accumulation of cognitive, social and emotional capabilities that allow individuals to lead healthy and productive lives. Longitudinal data offered a unique opportunity to study these developmental processes, allowing me to move beyond snapshots of poverty towards an understanding of how inequalities emerge and persist across childhood and adolescence.
Joining Young Lives profoundly shaped my intellectual development. The study’s exceptional longitudinal design allowed me to follow children over two decades and to ask questions that cross-sectional surveys cannot answer. Rather than observing isolated moments in children’s lives, I could examine developmental trajectories: how early nutrition influences later cognitive skills; how socio-emotional competencies affect educational transitions; how social protection changes opportunities during adolescence; and how early experiences reverberate into adulthood. Increasingly, I came to see development as a cumulative process in which early experiences influence later opportunities through multiple interacting pathways.
Over time, the world around my research changed. Climate change intensified. Armed conflict displaced millions of children. The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted education systems and labour markets on an unprecedented scale. These events reinforced the relevance of a life-course perspective. They also prompted a shift in my own thinking.
Rather than asking only how human capital develops, I began asking how adversity reshapes development.
This change in perspective transformed my research programme. My work increasingly examined how environmental shocks, conflict and pandemics affect cognitive development, mental health, educational attainment and labour market transitions. Through this work, I came to view shocks not as temporary interruptions but as developmental events capable of altering trajectories throughout childhood and early adulthood. This perspective also highlighted resilience—not as an individual characteristic, but as a property emerging from interactions between children, families, communities and institutions.
Mental health became an increasingly important part of this intellectual journey. Although development economics has traditionally focused on education, employment and income, my research demonstrated that psychological wellbeing is both an outcome of adversity and a determinant of future opportunities. Mental health influences learning, employment, social relationships and resilience, while simultaneously reflecting the cumulative effects of poverty, conflict and economic insecurity. Integrating mental health into the study of human development has therefore become one of the defining themes of my work.
Another important evolution has been my understanding of the relationship between research and policy. Early in my career, I viewed policy primarily as an application of scientific findings. Over time, I have come to appreciate that policy questions themselves often generate the most important scientific questions. Working closely with governments, international organisations and development partners has continually challenged me to ask questions that matter not only academically but also for the lives of children and young people. This reciprocal relationship between research and policy has shaped both the direction of my scholarship and my commitment to producing evidence that is rigorous, relevant and actionable.
As my career has progressed, my role has also evolved from researcher to research leader. Becoming Director of Young Lives represents more than a change in responsibilities; it reflects a commitment to sustaining and strengthening a global research infrastructure that enables interdisciplinary, longitudinal research across multiple countries and generations. Increasingly, I see leadership as creating the conditions in which others can ask ambitious questions, build international collaborations and generate evidence capable of informing global debates.
Today, I see my research programme as centred on a single idea: human development under adversity.
This idea brings together the different strands of my work—human capital, cognitive development, socio-emotional skills, mental health, climate change, conflict, poverty and resilience—within a common conceptual framework. It reflects a belief that understanding children’s lives requires integrating biological, psychological, social and economic processes across the life course. It also reflects a conviction that rigorous longitudinal evidence can identify not only how inequalities emerge but also how they can be reduced.
Looking ahead, I believe one of the defining scientific challenges of the coming decades will be understanding how multiple and overlapping shocks—including climate change, forced displacement, conflict and economic instability—interact to shape children’s development. Addressing this challenge will require new forms of interdisciplinary collaboration, innovative methods and sustained investment in longitudinal research. Through my leadership of Young Lives and the Research Hub on Climate Change and Environmental Shocks, I hope to contribute to this emerging scientific agenda while ensuring that evidence continues to inform policies that expand opportunities for future generations.
Ultimately, the question that has motivated me from the beginning remains unchanged. It is not simply how adversity affects children, but how societies can ensure that adversity does not determine their futures.