Tom O'Grady

Tom O'Grady is an Associate Professor of Political Science at University College London (UCL), where he has been a faculty member since 2017 after completing his PhD at MIT. He currently serves as director of the Political Science Department's PhD programme, demonstrating his significant leadership role within the department. His academic work centers on political economy, political behavior, and public policy with a particular focus on the UK and European contexts.

Dr. O'Grady's research spans several interconnected areas:

• Political economy of welfare systems and redistribution
• Political behavior and ideological attitudes
• Public policy development and discourse
• Politics of crime and punishment
• Geographic and demographic patterns in political attitudes
• Long-term trends in public opinion

His scholarly output demonstrates considerable breadth across political science subfields. Recent work examines the resilience of ideological beliefs during the COVID-19 pandemic, the geographic clustering of voters and its impact on redistributive politics, and long-term trends in welfare attitudes across four decades. He is particularly known for his 2022 book "The Transformation of British Welfare Policy: Politics, Discourse, and Public Opinion" which analyzes how political discourse shaped public opinion on welfare in Britain.

Dr. O'Grady's teaching includes an advanced undergraduate data science module on Causal Inference and an introductory undergraduate module on the Politics of Inequality. As director of the PhD program, he plays a key role in shaping graduate education in political science at UCL and actively supervises doctoral students in his areas of expertise.