Sonia Bhalotra has made contributions in the areas of health, gender and political economy. She is Principal Investigator on an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council (ERC) 2020-2025, Co-Investigator ESRC Research Centre on Micro-Social Change at the Institute of Social and Economic Research Essex 2019-2024, and Co-Investigator ESRC Project on Human Rights, Big Data and Technology at the Human Rights Centre in the Law department at Essex, 2015-2021. She is Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) London.
Her work has contributed to understanding the creation of human capital, the long run benefits of early life health interventions (clean water, antibiotics, infant care); maternal depression, maternal mortality, domestic violence, childhood mortality; gender inequality; the political economy of public service provision; accountability and the right to health; implementing universal health coverage; parental investments in children; intergenerational mobility, the gender pay gap and women’s labour force participation, and the dynamics of mortality, fertility and sex selection. Her research is set, inter alia, in India, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, America, the UK and Sweden.
She holds or has recently held research awards from the ESRC, Grand Challenges Explorations, Grand Challenges Canada, the British Academy, the Bank of Sweden, Innovations for Poverty Action, the Swedish Research Council, CEDIL, and the International Growth Centre. She is collaborating on a major NIH award led by Professor Maselko at UNC, that allows us to follow up children of a maternal depression trial. She is involved in the Bachpan cohort study incorporating a randomized control trial for maternal depression.
Sonia has acted as Keynote or Panels on fifteen occasions in the last three years- including a British Academy debate on global inequalities, the gender equality panel at an SDG financing event at the European Investment Bank, and an Academy of Social Science event celebrating Women in Social Science. She is on the International Advisory Boards of Lancet Women, Academics Stand Against Poverty Yale, The Millennium Nucleus for the Study of the Life Course and Vulnerability Santiago Chile, the Goettingen India Centre and a UNICEF network on adolescents in humanitarian crises. She is on the Peer Review Boards of the UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship and the GCRF, Visiting Professor at the University of Gothenburg and Research Fellow at SFI Denmark. She has recently served on Scientific Committees at the WHO, UNICEF, ILO, British Academy, the European Society of Population Economics Council, the International Review Panel of the Danish Research Council and several ESRC committees and was a CROP Research Fellow at Bergen and a Visiting Professor at Essen.
She has or has had collaborations with academics in Politics, Psychology, Philosophy, Medicine, Law. Sonia obtained an MPhil and PhD from Oxford and a BSc Hons from Delhi. Prior to joining Essex, Sonia was a Professor at the University of Bristol.