I came to Leicester in 2006. I completed my PhD in 1999 at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, following a BA at Kenyon College in Ohio. At Leicester I am the "convenor" of the department's research group on Well-being & Health.

My primary research focuses on international migration. My current work investigates the relationship between migration and happiness. In general, gaining more money doesn't make people happier, and so I'm led to wonder whether migration to a wealthier country increases happiness for migrants: I suspect that it makes many of them less happy, that economic migration is often a mistake insofar as people make great sacrifices to gain more income in the (possibly misguided) belief that they will then be happier. Articles published so far appear in International Studies Review, Work, Employment and Society and Social Indicators Research.

I recently organized (with a colleague, Jane Pilcher) a conference to explore possibilities for sociological contributions to happiness studies. This event led me to write a review article about happiness studies, now forthcoming in Sociology Compass (link). I also guest-edited an issue of Journal of Social Research and Policy on migration and happiness, published at the end of 2011 (link).

My first book, International Labor Migration: Foreign Workers and Public Policy (Palgrave Macmillan 2005), investigates foreign workers in Israel and Japan, using a political economy approach that emphasizes the institutional basis of different immigration policies. Articles emerging from this research have been published in International Migration Review, Politics & Society, and Ethnopolitics.

I am currently writing a book, Key Concepts in Migration Studies, to be published by Sage in 2013 (co-authored with Maritsa Poros of City College of New York and Pierre Monforte of Leicester).

My external activities relating to migration studies include membership of the governing board of RC31, the International Sociological Association's research committee on international migration. I am also a co-organizer for the Ethnicity, Race and Migration network of SASE (Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics).