Asking questions is one of the first things we do when we enter the world and, as we all discover early in life, many questions don’t have easy answers. While we might laugh and groan when a toddler raises yet another ‘why?’, I feel lucky that my work as a researcher at the Tavistock Institute means I get to ask that question every day!

The questions I’ve spent my career answering have been about justice and injustice. Why is taking up the right to social welfare often so complicated? Why do some communities have worse healthcare provision than others? Why do we design cities in ways that make them unequal? These are just a handful of the problems I’ve explored with the Tavistock Institute.

I use interviews, surveys, documentary analysis and more to try and make sense of the messy complexity beneath these questions, co-producing answers with beneficiaries wherever I can. My research and publications have supported policy makers, charities, and communities to improve people’s lives in fields including health, education, resilience, poverty, and transport.