Gillian Ruch, Professor of Social Work, University of Sussex

Gillian Ruch, Professor of Social Work, Department of Social Work and Social Care, University of Sussex, has been named as one of the world's most impactful academic scholars in her field following a study looking at the top 100 contributors to social work journal scholarship.

Published by Sage Journals, the study - conducted by David Hodge and Patricia Turnet from the School of Social Work, Arizona State University, Phoenix, AZ, USA - identified the top 100 most impactful global contributors to social work journal scholarship utilising a database of the world's leading scientists and extracting scholars in the social work category who were ranked according to a composite measure of scholarly impact that controls for self-citations and author order. 

Professor Ruch is not only a social work innovator and an international contributor and influencer of social work policy and practice, she is also the Director of the renowned Centre of Social Work Innovation and Research (CSWIR) at the University of Sussex.

An ESRC-funded study by Professor Ruch contributed recently to her Department's excellent REF results which were assessed to be 23% ‘world leading’ (4*) and 72% ‘internationally excellent’ (3*), with its research impact judged to be 25% ‘outstanding’ and 75% ‘internationally excellent’. Professor Ruch's 3* contribution was the four UK nation project, 'Talking and Listening to Children', which was the source of a number of publications in international journals and a springboard for impact-related work that drew on ‘Kitbag’ - a resource for  promoting the emotional literacy and social wellbeing of children and professionals.

More recently, Professor Ruch has been Co-Investigator on The Innovate Project where she has been leading a research strand focusing on Transitional Safeguarding. This four-year ESRC-funded project is in its final year. Several Transitional Safeguarding academic papers and practice-focused outputs will be published soon.