- Co-Investigator
Laurie’s background is in social gerontology and critical social theory within the broader field of public health. After completing her PhD in the Social Science and Health Program in the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto in 2011, she continued her research in the Department of Sociology at the University of Western Ontario.
Laurie’s research is principally concerned with better understanding health and economic inequalities among older adults in the context of the life course and in comparative perspective. She is a Co-Investigator on the WHERL project and interested in how work and family experiences across the life course influence patterns of labour market involvement in later life, the likelihood of working beyond the State Pension Age, and the implications of both for health and socioeconomic inequalities. She uses sophisticated and innovative quantitative modelling techniques (e.g., latent class models, optimal matching analysis) with large panel data sources to assess these relationships.
Laurie is also a Co-Investigator on two Canadian grants funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. This work addresses patterns of later-life employment and their relationship to health and financial well being in four theoretically distinct welfare contexts: Germany, Sweden, Italy and the US.
She is also involved in a collaborative project assessing poverty and health dynamics among working age adults in comparative perspective using multiple process latent transition models.