Dr Adriana Duta

Research Fellow

Moray House School of Education and Sport, IECS
University of Edinburgh

Tel: +44 (0)131 651 6458
Email: adriana.duta@ed.ac.uk

Street: Moray House School of Education and Sport, SLH 2.13
City: University of Edinburgh (Holyrood Campus)
Post code: EH8 8AQ

Biography

Background

Adriana is a Research Fellow within the ESRC-funded project 'Understanding Inequalities'. She joined the University of Edinburgh in 2015 as AQMeN Education and Social Stratification Research Fellow. She contributed to research on social inequalities in educational and labour market outcomes among young adults, and she is currently researching the factors associated with early emergence of social inequalities in cognitive and non-cognitive skills as precursors of later disadvantage.

Adriana has a background in Sociology, (BA, MA, University of Bucharest, 2009; MSc, University of Groningen/Interuniversity Centre for Social Science Theory and Methodology, 2011) and a PhD in Social Statistics and Demography (University of Southampton, 2016). Her PhD thesis investigated the link between parental education, intergenerational educational mobility and fertility and was funded by the ESRC (+3 Advanced Quantitative Methods scholarship). During her PhD, she was also awarded an ESRC Overseas Institutional Visit grant to visit The Center for Research on Inequalities and The Life Course within the Sociology department at Yale University. While at the University of Southampton, Adriana was involved in teaching introductory quantitative methods and co-authored a Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) report which examined whether there is a universal age when young graduates in the UK become independent from their family of origin.

Before starting her PhD, Adriana had worked for two years as a Research Assistant in the Sociology department at the University of Groningen where she also studied the relationship between social origin (i.e. parental education and social class) and typologies of transition to adulthood in different welfare regimes. Other activities in which Adriana was involved include a three-month internship focusing on gender statistics within the Statistical Division at the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe in Geneva (2011) and a one year research assistantship within national research/statistical system projects in Romania, mainly funded by international organisations such as EU, UNICEF and World Bank (2008-2009).

Teaching & PhD supervision

Postgraduate teaching

Teaching Assistant for the 'Quantitative Data Analysis' course (2017-2018)

MSc. thesis supervision:

1. Panxia Zhou ‘Inequalities by parental background in cognitive skills. Do non-cognitive skills matter?’ (quantitative analysis using Millennium Cohort Study), University of Edinburgh (2019)

2. Weijiao Cai ‘Parental education and children’s cognitive skills: the role of out-of-school education’ (quantitative analysis using Millennium Cohort Study), University of Edinburgh (2019)

Research

Research summary

Adriana has a strong research interest in social stratification in education, labour market and family behaviour and how individual and contextual factors interact in shaping people’ life chances across their life course. She tackles these topics using large-scale survey and administrative data and quantitative methods.