Gabriella Conti is Associate Professor in the Department of Economics and in the Social Research Institute at University College London and co-Investigator of the 1958 British Birth Cohort (the National Child Development Study). She is a Research Fellow of the Institute for Fiscal Studies and of the Centre for Economic Policy Research and a member of the Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Global Working Group.

She holds a Doctorate from the University of Naples “Federico II” and a Ph.D. from the University of Essex. She has been a Visiting Fellow at the University of Princeton and Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Before joining UCL, she was a Post-Doctoral Scholar in the Department of Economics at the University of Chicago and then a Research Assistant Professor at the Harris School of Public Policy.

Her research areas of interest are health economics, the economics of human development, and biology and economics. Her research draws on both the biomedical and the social sciences with the aim of understanding the developmental origins of health inequalities, and the behavioural and biological pathways through which early life shocks, investments and policies affecting child well-being have health consequences throughout the lifecourse. She has studied several programs, such as the Abecedarian and the Perry Preschool Projects in US, Sure Start and the Family Nurse Partnership in UK, and Seguro Popular in Mexico. She has published in top journals in different disciplines, such as Science, Lancet, PNAS, Pediatrics, and the Economic Journal, the Journal of Econometrics, the Journal of Human Resources, and the Review of Economics and Statistics. Her research has been supported among others by the National Institutes of Health, Horizon 2020, the Nuffield Foundation, and the British Academy.

She has been recently been awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize in Economics, which “recognises the achievement of outstanding researchers whose work has already attracted international recognition and whose future career is exceptionally promising”; and the Nick Hales Award from the DOHaD society, for a “young and emerging investigator who has made an outstanding scientific contribution to the DOHaD field”. She is also the PI of a 5-year ERC Consolidator Award from the European Research Council (SH1 Economics Panel) for the project “The Developmental Origins of Health: Biology, Shocks, Investments, and Policies”.

Gabriella Conti joined IZA as a Research Fellow in March 2019.