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- Honorary Emeritus
- IOE - Social Research Institute
- UCL Institute of Education
Heather is now an Emeritus Professor of Economic and Developmental Demography at the Centre for Longitudinal Studies, UCL Social Research Institute. She had been the Director of the Centre for Longitudinal Studies (when it was in the (Institute of Education)from 2003 to 2010, and its Deputy Director from 1994.
Previous employment included City University, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Birkbeck College, the Government Economic Service, and Oxford University. She graduated from Oxford with a degree in Philosophy, Politics & Economics in 1967 and an M.Litt in Economics in 1970.
She was the President of the European Society for Population Economics in 1996 and of the British Society for Population Studies in 1998-9. She was Co-Chair of the European Child Cohort Network fostering international collaboration and comparison between cohort studies and the founder President of the Society for Longitudinal and Life Course Studies. She is the executive editor of the Society’s journal, Longitudinal and Life Course Studies.
Heather is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and of the British Academy. She was the chair of Section 4 of the British Academy- Sociology, Demography, Social Statistics, Social Policy, and Criminology from 2019-2021.
She was awarded a CBE in 2015 for services to Longitudinal Studies and Women's Studies (OBE in 2002).




Heather is an economic demographer who has worked on a number of longitudinal datasets for the UK, principally the national birth cohort studies. She has been concerned with the creation and promotion of such datasets as resources for the academic and policy community. In particular, she was the director of the Millennium Cohort Study, 2000-2011. She had previously become known for research on the impact of childbearing on women’s lifetime earnings (The Tale of Mrs Typical) and her investigation of the impact of maternal employment on child development (The Myth of the Working Mother). Other research, mostly interdisciplinary collaborations, has touched on gender in the labour market, social mobility, child mental health, residential mobility and neighbourhood.
Current projects include an investigation of the gender pay gap in British in data from British cohort studies, and the development of a new Early Life national cohort study. Recent projects, which both use data from the Millennium Cohort Study, include one on the interrelation of children’s cognitive development with their mental health, and the outcomes of family residential mobility.
Masters Course Organiser:
- Issues in Population and Development for MSc in Medical Demography, LSHTM, 1979-1993. Supervised ca 2 dissertations per year.
- Demography, Women and the Labour Market, MSc in Gender Studies, Birkbeck College, 1992-3
- Economic Demography, option in the MSc in Economics, Birkbeck 1989-90
Doctoral degrees
- Successfully supervised 7 PhD dissertations. Examined 23 doctorates at 14 national and international universities.