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Staff Details

Richard Layte

Research Professor

Prof. Richard Layte is joint programme coordinator of Health Research at the ESRI. An economic sociologist, he has worked at the ESRI since 1998.

Richard Layte’s work centres on patterns of social and economic disadvantage and inequality in developed countries, the individual and structural drivers of this and its influence on health and well-being across the lifecourse.

One of the main threads of his work has been the measurement and analysis of poverty, deprivation and social exclusion and he has published widely on these subjects in both international academic journals and the Irish policy literature. His work on disadvantage has also led to a number of publications on social class and social mobility in Ireland and how this has changed with Irish social and economic development.

Richard Layte’s recent work has focused on the influence of social disadvantage and inequality on health and well-being. He has a particular interest in the way in which family background influences child health and development and the manner in which this shapes the child’s educational and occupational success. In 2010 he was awarded a HRB Research Project Grant (with Dermot O’Reilly from Queen’s University Belfast) to examine these processes using data from the Growing Up in Ireland national child cohort study.

Another research thread examines patterns of mortality and life expectancy in the Irish population and how inequalities in this have changed over time. In 2011 Richard Layte and Anne Nolan from the ESRI were awarded a HRB Research Project Grant to examine mortality trends 1986 to 2006 and the possible role of economic development and health care on these.

Along with colleagues from the ESRI’s Health Research and Information Division Richard Layte has carried out research on the social and economic drivers of trends in caesarean section in Ireland. In 2012 Richard Layte was awarded a third HRB Research Project Grant with Prof. Michael Turner (Professor of obstetrics & gynaecology UCD centre for reproduction) to examine variation in caesarean section rates in Irish hospitals.

Richard Layte is a ‘Health’ theme director (with Prof. Tom O’Dowd, Trinity College Dublin) of the Growing Up in Ireland Cohort Study and Director of the Centre for Longitudinal Studies in Ireland (www.clsi.ie).

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