Aleks works within the Insight Infrastructure team at JRF, making high-quality data and evidence easier to access, use, and act on — for researchers, policymakers, charities, and community organisations across the country, as well as internally at JRF. The team aspires to build a better picture of poverty and inequality by exposing and filling data gaps, generating insight from new data sources, and learning from lived experience.
Aleks started her career as an academic researcher looking at birth outcomes of refugees, and how metabolic rates change under famine conditions for the World Health Organisation. She then worked for a community educational theatre group in Vanuatu, designing and carrying out surveys in Vanuatu, Fiji and the Solomon Islands, before working for the Vanuatu Government Statistics Office, co-running their 1999 National Census. In the UK, she worked for the Office of National Statistics as a medical research analyst, an author of Social Trends, and in the 2011 Census team designing the ethnicity and religion questions. Aleks then worked at NatCen, where her focus was on the wellbeing of children. Prior to her current role, Aleks was the project lead for JRF's flagship annual UK Poverty report.
Email: aleks.collingwood@jrf.org.uk
X: @jrfAleks