New Year’s Honours: University of Oxford researcher from Highgate made OBE

A researcher at the University of Oxford has been given a nod from the Queen in the New Year Honours List.

Ceridwen Roberts, of North Road, Highgate, has been made an OBE for her services to social sciences during her long and varied career in research.

“I was really pleased that social science was being recognised as so often it’s the poor relation in terms of other subjects, so I’m really thrilled,” Ms Roberts, 66, said.

She named the highlight of her career as being the co-author of the Women in Employment study in 1984 while working for the Department of Employment, the first survey to look into the experiences of women in the workplace.

Ms Roberts said the only regret of her career was not personal, but that she wished the Family Policy Studies Centre in Bloomsbury, where she worked for about 10 years, had not closed in 2001. She believes the work carried out there is “still vitally necessary”.

Ms Roberts, co-chairman of the Friends of Waterlow Park and trustee of Highgate Cemetery, joined history of medicine professor Elizabeth Tansey, of Camden Town, in being made an OBE for academic work.