Rocío Méndez Pineda was a Research Assistant with the LSE Middle East Centre proejct Researching the Quality of Employment in the Middle East and a PhD student at the IoE’s Social Research Institute at UCL. She holds a BA in Economics from the Escuela Superior en Economía y Negocios (ESEN) in El Salvador, an MA in Public Policy from the Universidad de Chile and an MSc in Social Research Methods from UCL.

In addition, she has worked as a Research Assistant at the LSE’s International Inequalities Institute. In Chile, she worked as a Researcher at the Universidad de Chile and the Universidad Diego Portales, where she also taught courses on Statistical Inference. In El Salvador, she worked as a Junior Researcher in Economics and Social Policy at the Salvadoran Foundation for Economic and Social Development (FUSADES). Also, Rocío has worked as a consultant for UNICEF and FAO on multidimensional child poverty and decent work topics. Her research at LSE focuses on inequalities, labour markets and social mobility, with applications to the Middle East, Latin America and Europe. Rocío has published in World Development, Social Indicators Research and Regional Studies.