April 28, 2022 | News | Congratulations

Lydia Palumbo Obtained Her Doctorate

© MPIDR

Lydia Palumbo successfully defended her dissertation at the University of Southampton on April, 13th. The thesis was accepted without corrections, which is unusual.

Lydia has spent the last couple of years as a PhD student in the Laboratory of Fertility and Well-Being at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, where she was supervised by Ann Berrington (Southampton) and Peter Eibich. In her dissertation titled “The relationship between economic precariousness, parental socio-economic status, and partnership dynamics among young adults in the UK” she examines in three empirical chapters how economic precariousness affects young adults’ expectations towards family formation, their entry into a first co-residential union as well as the transition from a co-residential union to marriage or dissolution in the UK. The first of these three papers has already been accepted for publication at Population Studies.

Lydia’s dissertation was examined by Brienna Perelli-Harris (University of Southampton) and Anna Matysiak (University of Warsaw). After an intense 2-hour discussion, Brienna and Anna recommended that Lydia should be awarded her PhD without any further corrections to her thesis. This is a very rare outcome for PhD students in the UK and further demonstrates the quality of Lydia’s work.

Lydia has taken up a postdoctoral position at the University of Turku recently, but she remains affiliated with MPIDR as a guest researcher.