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- Fee (Policy and Society)
- IOE - Social Research Institute
- UCL Institute of Education
- 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 Institute of Education. She had been the Director of the Centre for Longitudinal Studies 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 was the President of the European Society for Population Economics in 19996 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 is the Chair of Section 4 of the British Academy- Sociology, Demography, Social Statistics, Social Policy and Criminology.,
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, one of the interrelation of children’s cognitive development with their mental health, and the outcomes of family residential mobility . The latter two are based on data from the Millennium Cohort