معرفی
Professor Orla Doyle is a Professor in the School of Economics and a Research Fellow at the UCD Geary Institute for Public Policy at University College Dublin. She currently serves as the Director of the UCD Childhood and Human Development Research Centre and holds leadership positions including Deputy Head of the UCD School of Economics and Director of the MSc in Behavioural Economics. Her academic journey at UCD began in 2004 as a Postdoctoral Researcher, progressing through Lecturer (2007), Assistant Professor (2011), Associate Professor (2017), to her current Professorship (2023).
Professor Doyle's educational background includes a BA (Mod) and PhD from Trinity College Dublin. Her research program centers on the economics of human behavior with particular focus on early childhood intervention programs. She has developed and led an interdisciplinary research program studying how investing in early human capital can reduce social and economic inequalities. Her work spans economics, psychology, psychiatry, education, medicine, public health, and political science, with 55 publications in leading international journals.
Her research investigates the role of early life conditions in shaping later life outcomes, using experimental designs to evaluate interventions aimed at ameliorating poverty. The cornerstone of her work is the Preparing for Life study, the longest-running early childhood field experiment in Europe, which has generated over 25 papers examining impacts on birth outcomes, health, behavior, and cognitive skills. She designs field experiments and analyzes longitudinal datasets to understand how environmental factors influence children's development.
Professor Doyle has secured numerous research grants totaling over 37 projects, including studies on gender social movements, intergenerational consequences of early life conditions, and cardiovascular disease prevention. Her work demonstrates significant methodological innovation in addressing issues like contamination, social desirability bias, missing data, and attrition in policy evaluation.
Among her professional activities, she co-founded and serves as co-chair of the Irish Society for Women in Economics, has served on grant review panels for ESRC and Swiss National Science Foundation, and has organized policy engagement events including the Geary Roundtable on targeting research at policymakers. She has also been active in public engagement through Careers in Economics workshops for secondary students and crisis response events during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In teaching, she coordinates multiple advanced modules including 'Behavioural Economics: Policy Applications,' 'Experiments in Economics,' and 'Field Experiments in Social Science,' and serves as Director of the MSc in Behavioural Economics program. Her teaching philosophy emphasizes experiential learning and the application of economic principles to real-world policy challenges.
