Colleagues conferred title of Professor

The Department is pleased to announce that the Divisional Appointments and Remuneration Panel (DARP), on authority from the Senior Appointment Panel, have agreed to confer the title of Professor from 1 October 2026 on Angelique Day, Clive Diaz and Ludovica Serratrice.

Angelique Day and Clive Diaz, both named as Professors of Social Work, are Senior Academic Leaders in Children’s Social Care at the Rees Centre for Research in Fostering and Education.

Professor Day’s research focuses on children’s social care, particularly care leavers pursuing higher education, children and young people’s participation and engagement in case planning and permanency, kinship care, foster and adoptive parent preparation and support, and Indian Child Welfare, as well as extensive work in translating research to inform public policy decision-making.

Professor Day said: “I am humbled and honoured to be appointed as a Professor at the Department, and immensely proud of what this milestone represents. While it marks a personal achievement, it is also a recognition of the importance of research that seeks to improve the lives of children and families.”

Professor Diaz’s research explores children’s and families’ experiences of children’s social care, with a particular focus on how they are involved in decisions that affect their lives.

His work considers children’s participation, parental advocacy, and how policy is reflected in everyday social work practice.

Professor Diaz said: “I’m delighted to have been named a Professor of Social Work. I’m looking forward to continuing my work at the Department and contributing research that can make a positive difference to policy and practice in the child welfare system.

“At the Rees Centre, I’m particularly keen to create more opportunities for peer researchers and people with lived experience of the child welfare system.”

Ludovica Serratrice, Professor of Multilingualism and Inclusive Education, is a Senior Academic Research Leader at the Department. Her research investigates how bilingual and multilingual speakers represent and process multiple languages, and how these languages interact throughout development.

She combines psycholinguistic approaches to syntactic representations in both the heritage language and the societal language, with more applied linguistic research on children’s listening and reading comprehension in the language of schooling.

She said: “I am delighted and honoured to have been awarded the title of Professor. I look forward to continuing my work with multilingual learners, their families, and their teachers, and to contributing to the Department’s research on language, learning, and educational inclusion.”