Rachel Loopstra

Rachel Loopstra’s research focuses on understanding social welfare policy as a determinant of population health and well-being. Her interests broadly focus on material deprivation, examining how social welfare expansion and retrenchment influence food insecurity and housing insecurity, and the social and health consequences of these experiences.

She joined the Department of Sociology at the Univesity of Oxford in February 2014 to work with Professor David Stuckler. Current work focuses on evaluating the human costs of recently implemented austerity measures in the UK. In particular, she has been evaluating how welfare reforms and local authority budget cuts relate to homelessness, food bank expansion, and child malnutrition, and the impact of welfare sanctioning on employment and welfare caseloads.

Rachel completed her PhD in Nutritional Sciences at the University of Toronto. Her doctoral research focused on understanding drivers and outcomes of food insecurity in Canada.