Suzanne King
I have always been interested in public and social policy issues and my training in social research has enabled me to contribute to policy development in a range of policy areas. Consequently the evidence we use in our consultancy work is robust because it has been collected using sound research methods for both data collection and analysis. I get great satisfaction from seeing our high quality research findings applied to the development of policy and practice.
At PSP I have taken a central role in the development of the portfolio of social research – both qualitative and quantitative. I have also designed many public engagement activites. I have never believed that one method is better than another and at PSP we strive to understand our clients’ problems so that we can recommend the most appropriate approach. Often this is a combination of methods and it is the drawing together of data that generates real insight. Increasingly we are being commissioned to undertake social research projects as well as to use social research methods in our consultancy work.
I began my career with a PhD in youth unemployment and the development of youth training and employment schemes. I then worked for the Department of Employment as a Research/Senior Research Officer before joining Abbey National as a Research Executive. Preferring to be involved in undertaking rather than managing research, I joined the market and social research company Insight Social Research and then RSL (now IPSOS MORI), where I rose to become director and head of the social research unit. I moved to the Wellcome Trust in 1996, first as Policy Research Manager and then as head of Consultation and Education, where I played a significant role in the development of science and citizenship and policy-focused research into the public’s relationship to science and science-based issues. I was also responsible for the design of the joint OST/Wellcome Trust public attitudes to science project, published in 2000 as “Science and the Public” and involved in the 2008 up-date of that work “Public Attitudes to Science”.
My first degree is in Economics and Government from the University of Manchester, and I have a MSc in Urban and Regional Planning Studies from the London School of Economics. My PhD was awarded by the Centre for Urban and Regional Development Studies at Newcastle University in 1987 and is a study of the policy response to high levels of youth unemployment in the 1970s and 1980s. I am a full member of the Market Research Society, a member of the Social Research Association and Visiting Fellow in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia.
Update 2010
Suzanne King has joined the editorial committee of People and Science, the magazine of the British Science Association and has recently been interviewed about careers in science policy in Edinburgh University's science magazine.