Philip J. O'Connell is Emeritus Professor at UCD. He was Director of the UCD Geary Institute and Professor of Applied Social Science at University College Dublin from 2013 to 2021.
Prior to that, he was Research Professor and Head of Social Research at the ESRI and Adjunct Professor of Sociology at Trinity College Dublin. He received his doctorate from Indiana University, Bloomington and taught at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He has served as a consultant to the European Commission and the OECD.
He is a government-appointed member of the Irish national Labour Market Council. Most of his work focuses on the labour market and on migration.
He has an enduring interest in equality at work and in access to employment, publishing papers in the leading journals on wage inequality, on working conditions and workplace practices, on the transition from unemployment to work, and on the experience of migrant workers in Ireland.