Dr Kate Williams was awarded the 2021-2024 ESRC grant as Principal Investigator of the ‘Impact of Impact’ project, with a funding allocation of £668,000 ($1.26 million AUD). As Lecturer of Public Policy at the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne and Research Fellow at King’s College London, she studies the intersection of public policy, sociology and research policy, with a focus on cultures of evaluation and emerging methods of research impact assessment.

Her previous work, funded by an ESRC Future Research Leaders Grant and a British Academy and Leverhulme Grant, investigated the creation and assessment of value in policy knowledge contexts, including the World Bank, London School of Economics and J-PAL. Kate has published on these topics in Research Evaluation, Policy Studies Journal, Policy and Society, Public Administration, The Sociological Review and other venues.

Prior to joining Melbourne, Kate was a Lecturer in Public Policy at the University of York from 2019-2020. Previously, she was an ESRC Research Fellow from 2016-2019 in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge and a Research Fellow at Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge. In 2018/2019, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Weatherhead Centre for International Affairs, Harvard University. Kate holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Cambridge, funded by a Commonwealth Scholarship and the Cambridge Overseas Trust.