Inclusive Data Taskforce

Dame Moira Gibb (Chair) is Chair of Skills for Care and Chair of City Lit Adult Education College. She also chairs the National Statistician’s Data Ethics Advisory Committee and is a Non-executive Director of Rothesay Life Foundation. She was a non-executive director of NHS England and of the UK Statistics Authority and a member of the Council of Reading University and served on the Health Advisory committee of NESTA.

She was a Civil Service Commissioner from 2012-15 and a Director of the London Marathon from 2005-11. Her executive career was in social services and local government, latterly as Chief Executive of Camden Council. She was appointed Dame Commander (DBE) in 2012 for services to social care and local government. She has received honorary degrees from the University of East Anglia and Kingston.

Dr Halima Begum is a Director at the Runnymede Trust Dr Begum joined Runnymede in 1998 as a young researcher on the Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain, before taking up positions with Action Aid and the LSE Centre for Civil Society. She has also held senior leadership positions with a range of influential organisations, including First Secretary with Department for International Development (DFID), Director of the British Council in Asia, and Vice President of the LEGO Foundation.

Dr Begum’s experience spans sectors including education, human rights, public health, the environment, and post-conflict reconstruction. Her portfolio of responsibilities has included coordinating the Sino-British government action plan to reduce food insecurity due to climate change, leading the UK effort in promoting girls’ education in Pakistan, and heading up collaborations between science and technology institutions in Britain and South East Asia.

Dr Gwenetta D. Curry is a Lecturer of Race, Ethnicity, and Health in the Usher Institute at the University of Edinburgh. Her research interests are Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities, Critical Race Theory, and Black Family Studies. Her present research analyses racial disparities in treatment and infection rates of Covid-19.

She is the co-author of the UNCOVER Covid-19 Evidence review “What is the Evidence on Ethnic Variation on Covid-19 Incidence and Outcomes,” and “Sharpening the global focus on ethnicity and race in the time of COVID-19” which has recently appeared in The Lancet. She is a member of The Royal Society’s DELVE Initiative and a senior research associate in the Global Health Governance Programme at the University of Edinburgh Medical School.

Professor Dave Gordon is Professor of Social Justice and Director of the Bristol Poverty Institute and Director of the Townsend Centre for International Poverty Research at the University of Bristol.

Professor Gordon was a member of the UN Expert Group on Poverty Statistics (Rio Group) and contributed to its ‘Compendium of Best Practice in Poverty Measurement’. He has acted as an external expert for the European Union Working Group on Income, Poverty and Social Exclusion and was a member of the EU Task Force on Material Deprivation. He was appointed as a scientific advisor to the European Union/Latin American Network 10 – Fight against Urban Poverty. He advised the United Nations Department for Economic & Social Affairs (UNDESA) on poverty and hunger issues amongst young people and contributed to the 2005, 2007 and 2009 World Youth Reports.

Professor Gordon advised the World Health Organisation on measurement issues concerning water & sanitation access in low- and middle-income countries. He worked with UNICEF on its first ever Global Study on Child Poverty and Disparities, providing scientific advice and support to over 50 UNICEF country offices. Professor Gordon was also an international advisor for the development of the official multidimensional poverty measure in Mexico and has advised the New Zealand and UK Governments on poverty measurement and anti-poverty policies.

From 2008 to 2011, he held a public appointment to the Child Poverty Expert Group, a Ministerial Advisory Group that provided the Minister for Children and the Welsh Assembly Government with expert, evidenced based advice on the actions needed to tackle child poverty in Wales. He recently led the Poverty and Social Exclusion in the United Kingdom project.

Professor Anthony Heath, CBE, FBA is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Oxford and Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Social Investigation, Nuffield College, Oxford. Anthony specializes in survey research and his research interests cover social stratification and inequality, ethnicity, electoral behaviour and national identity.

He has published many books and over 200 scientific papers, his most recent book being Social Progress in Britain (Oxford University Press, 2018).  Anthony led the 2010 Ethnic Minority British Election Survey (ESRC-funded) and (as part of a comparative European study) a programme of field experiments on racial discrimination in the British labour market (Horizon2020-funded).

He has carried out work for many government and international bodies, including work for UNDP on community relations in Bosnia, for the OECD on discrimination and the labour market integration of the children of migrants, for the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government on social cohesion, for Lord Goldsmith’s Citizenship Review on national identity, for the Department for Work and Pensions on ethnic penalties in the labour market, for the EHRC on group inequalities in education and employment, and for the Equality Commission for Northern Ireland evaluating the affirmative action programme.  He is currently leading a project for the Social Mobility Commission developing their new measurement framework.

Dr Saffron Karlsen is an Associate Professor in Sociology at the University of Bristol. Dr Karlsen’s work aims to enable a better understanding of the different ways in which ethnicity has meaning and relevance in people’s lives, both for developing awareness of potential group affiliations and as a driver of health and other inequalities. Her work was instrumental establishing empirical evidence regarding the role of racism in the development of ethnic inequalities in health in the UK. Her work is motivated by the need for more effective engagement of marginalised groups in the co-production of research, policy and practice.

She has long-standing collaborations with the Race Equality Foundation and Black South West Network. She is currently part of the Race Equality Covid-19 Steering Group led by Bristol City Council, with 90 multi-sectoral stakeholders from across the region.

She has acted as an advisor to the Scottish Executive, Cabinet Office and New Zealand Health Department and has worked with the WHO and UN. Recent work on ethnic inequalities in experiences of covid-19 in collaboration with the British Academy has been referenced by SAGE. Prior to taking up this post Professor Karlsen was a senior research fellow in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at UCL.

Professor Ann Phoenix is Professor of Psychosocial Studies at the Institute of Education, UCL. Professor Phoenix is a psychologist and academic, whose research focuses on psychosocial issues related to identity. She is Professor of Psychosocial Studies at the Institute of Education, University College London.

She was previously ESRC Professorial Fellow for the Transforming Experiences research programme, Co-Director of the Thomas Coram Research Unit and Reader in Psychology at the Open University. She is a Fellow of the British Academy. Her research interests include social identities; psychosocial processes; parenting practices and everyday family lives; intersectionality; young people; racialisation, ethnicity and gender; narrative research and mixed methods.

Professor Lucinda Platt is Professor of Social Policy and Sociology in the Department of Social Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She joined the Department in 2013 from UCL Institute of Education, where she was Director of the Millennium Cohort Study. Professor Platt’s research focuses on the analysis of inequality within and between social groups, in the UK and internationally; and she is currently a panel member for the IFS Deaton Inequality Review. As part of her work for the Deaton Review, she recently co-authored a study investigating ethnic inequalities in vulnerability to COVID-19. She also works on identity and inter-group relations, child poverty and child development, and the methodology and history of social surveys.

Dr Wanda Wyporska is Executive Director at The Equality Trust, the national charity that campaigns to reduce social and economic inequalities. Dr Wyporska is a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of York, a trustee of ACEVO (Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations), Redthread Youth, Vice Chair of Equally Ours and Governor of a primary school.

Dr Wyporska is a regular keynote speaker and sits on or has advised a range of bodies. She has fed into the Government and Shadow Cabinet on a variety of policies, is an Equalities Advisor to the London Recovery Taskforce, and sits on the Mayor’s EDI Advisory Group, the VCSEP Equality Steering Group and the global Fight Inequality Alliance Steering Group. Dr Wyporska has over a decade of experience working in the trade union movement, leading on equalities, social mobility and education policy.

She is a TEDx speaker and has spoken at the United Nations, among other national and international platforms. She regularly comments in the media, having appeared on Newsnight, BBC Radio 4’s The Moral Maze, Sky News, and BBC 1’s The Big Questions, and written for The Guardian, HuffPo, and The Independent among other outlets.