Sonia Bhalotra is Professor of Economics at the University of Warwick. She obtained an MPhil and DPhil from Oxford and a BSc Hons from Delhi. Her research has made contributions in the areas of health, gender and political economy.

She is currently Principal Investigator on an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council 2021-2026, Co-Investigator ESRC Research Centre on Micro-Social Change at ISER Essex 2019-2024, Co-Investigator ESRC Project on Human Rights, Big Data and Technology at the Human Rights Centre Essex 2015-2021 and Co-Investigator on a CEDIL and NIH funded project 2020-2025.

She is Fellow of the International Economic Association (2021-), Fellow of the UK Academy of Social Sciences (2019-), the Centre for Economic Policy Research CEPR London (2019-), IEPS Brazil (2020-), SFI Denmark (2012-).

Her work has contributed to understanding skill creation, the long run benefits of early life health interventions (clean water, antibiotics, infant care); maternal and child health including mental health (maternal depression, adolescent mental health), maternal mortality; domestic violence, gender inequality; the political economy of public service provision; accountability and the right to health; implementing universal health coverage; parental investments in children; intergenerational mobility, the gender pay gap and women’s labour force participation, and the dynamics of mortality, fertility and sex selection. Her research is set, inter alia, in India, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, America, the UK and Sweden.

Sonia has acted as Keynote or Panelist on fifteen occasions in the last three years- including a British Academy debate on global inequalities, the gender equality panel at an SDG financing event at the European Investment Bank, and an Academy of Social Science event celebrating Women in Social Science.

She is on the International Advisory Boards of Lancet Women, Academics Stand Against Poverty Yale, The Millennium Nucleus for the Study of the Life Course and Vulnerability Santiago Chile, the Goettingen India Centre and a UNICEF network on adolescents in humanitarian crises. She is on the Peer Review Boards of the UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship and the GCRF, Visiting Professor at the University of Gothenburg and Research Fellow at SFI Denmark. She has recently served on Scientific Committees at the WHO, UNICEF, ILO, British Academy, the European Society of Population Economics Council, the International Review Panel of the Danish Research Council and several ESRC committees and was a CROP Research Fellow at Bergen and a Visiting Professor at Essen.

She has or has had collaborations with academics in Politics, Psychology, Philosophy, Medicine, Law.

Her AER March 2020 paper was covered in AER Research Highlights: https://www.aeaweb.org/research/maternal-depression-cognitive-behavioral-therapy. And summarised in this Video: https://youtu.be/gFbFi7LTWaI

The IGC/LSE created this video of her paper showing that economic growth improves under women legislators: https://www.theigc.org/multimedia/are-women-politicians-good-for-economic-growth/

Her daughter Sameera made this video of her 2013 paper on cognitive development and infectious disease: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-MKyN6bTEgIY7GddXFu9aE-_pJe_kIrS/view?usp=sharing

She has written several blogs, some of which can be found here:
https://www.iser.essex.ac.uk/blog?author=14
https://www.hrbdt.ac.uk/domestic-violence-during-covid-19-related-lockdown/
http://www.ideasforindia.in/search.html
https://voxdev.org/users/srbhalotra