Elsbeth Neil is a senior lecturer in social work at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK. Dr. Neil has been undertaking research in the field of adoption for almost 20 years. She has conducted a longitudinal study, following young children placed for adoption and studying the impact of birth family contact on these children and their birth and adoptive parents. She recently completed a follow-up of this sample, the adopted young people now being in late adolescence/early adulthood and a summary of the key findings has been published by the British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF).

She has carried out two studies funded as part of the UK government’s Adoption Research Initiative: the ‘Helping Birth Families’ study has examined support services for birth relatives of children adopted from care, and the ‘Supporting Direct Contact’ study has looked at how adoption agencies support face-to-face contact arrangements between adoptive children and their birth relatives. Both of these studies have also been published by BAAF. She has also published a number of journal articles about her research and has edited two collections of adoption research (E. Neil and D. Howe, 2004, Contact in Adoption and Permanent Foster Care published by BAAF; and G. Wrobel and E. Neil, International Advances in Adoption Research for Practice, published by Wiley in 2009). In 2006 she organised and chaired the Second International Conference on Adoption Research, held at UEA.