SDS PhD Research Competition Judges
The PhD research competition invites SDS and non SDS students to select a part of their research whether it’s a key finding, methodology, or concept and create a creative, engaging poster.
It’s an opportunity to simplify and effectively communicate their research in a visually compelling way, to a non-specialist audience.
Find out more about this year's judges:
April Robertson
April Robertson is a senior equality executive at SDS. April began her career journey over thirty years ago as a careers adviser working in schools, colleges and in adult guidance before becoming a team leader. For the past ten years she has worked with colleagues and partners to improve the accessibility of Apprenticeships for under-represented groups and address occupational segregation.
At present April is focussed on working to deliver The Scottish Apprenticeship Advisory Board (SAAB) Care Experienced report on making apprenticeships more accessible for care experienced young people, report here . And sharing the learning and resources from the Women into STEM pathway development projects looking at developing pipelines for women 16-24 into STEM careers including Modern and Graduate Apprenticeships.
Dr Graeme Smith
Graeme Smith is a Research and Evaluation Executive at Skills Development Scotland. His main area of work involves evaluating the Careers Information, Advice and Guidance (CIAG) services in Scotland and undertaking research with young people. With a background in psychological research, Graeme is particularly interested in understanding the factors that influence young people’s decisions around career pathways.
Dr Valeria Skafida
Valeria Skafida is a senior lecturer in Social Policy at the University of Edinburgh. Her research interests straddle the disciplines of social policy, sociology and public health. She has worked on a number of substantive streams, including infant feeding and children’s diets, and more recently on social inequalities in domestic abuse victimisation and impacts on children’s wellbeing outcomes. The red thread across her work is the examination of social inequalities in children and young people’s wellbeing outcomes, with the aim to reflect on what state policies and services can do – or fail to do – to address these. She is supervising one, and soon to be two, students undertaking research on social inequalities in young people’s post school transitions and destinations.
More of her research draws primarily on quantitative analysis methods and longitudinal population survey data. She is a methods enthusiast and thus a fan of all discussions related to 'measurement' - broadly defined.
Dr Katherine Keenan
Katherine Keenan is a Senior Lecturer at the University of St Andrews in the School of Geography and Sustainable Development. From 2024 she has worked as the Deputy Director (training) for the Scottish Graduate School for Social Science, which works to develop core and specialist training for social science postgraduate students across Scottish universities.
She has a multidisciplinary background with degrees in anthropology, demography and epidemiology. Her research interests are in the complex determinants of population health, and she currently leads projects on the social dimensions of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and multimorbidity, and social dimensions of miscarriage (funded by the ERC). These primarily use quantitative and mixed methods data. My current projects involve international collaborations with research organisations in East Africa, Brazil, France and Norway. I am also Co-I of the ESRC-funded Connecting Generations centre, which explores intergenerational processes, family and inequality in the UK.
