Apresentação Pessoal

Alexandra Lopes has a PhD from the London School of Economics (LSE) in Social Policy, with a thesis on the implications of demographic ageing for family-based welfare systems. She is a lecturer in Sociology at the Department of Sociology of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Porto.

A specialist in the general field of ageing studies, she has developed her research activity around some specific themes, including the management of dependencies and care systems in Portugal; inequalities and poverty among the older population; theoretical developments in the concept of social class in relation to demographic ageing; methodologies for measuring and analyzing social phenomena related to ageing issues.

Alexandra Lopes has participated in and coordinated numerous research projects in the broad field of social studies on ageing, most notably the project LET'sCARE - LEARNING FROM LONG-TERM CARE PRACTICES FOR THE EUROPEAN CARE STRATEGY, a project approved for funding under the Horizon Europe program and scheduled to begin work in April 2024. This is a 3-year project that brings together a broad consortium that will look at the general theme of policies and practices in the field of long-term care for people with dependencies. LET's CARE aims to make a fundamental contribution to the advancement of knowledge in the service of the implementation of the European Strategy for Care.

Prior to this project, Alexandra had already participated in the SPRINT project - SOCIAL PROTECTION INNOVATIVE INVESTMENT ON LONG-TERM CARE, whose national team she coordinated, with funding from the European Commission under the Horizon2020 framework. SPRINT also lasted three years, ending in 2018, having developed a common matrix for the European area to evaluate the different solutions in the field of long-term care systems for the elderly population. This matrix applied the structuring principles of the concept of social investment and involved using the SROI matrix to analyze the different European countries. The outputs of the project, namely the tools developed to evaluate investments in the field of long-term care, are available for consultation and free use by the community.

Alexandra Lopes is the author of several national and international publications in the fields she researches. She works with the European Commission as an expert in the field of social inclusion of vulnerable populations and collaborates regularly with the Social Observatory of the La Caixa Foundation. She is currently the director of the Iberian PhD Program in Social Sciences and Ageing.