Academic Profile

I am on SABBATICAL LEAVE for the academic year 2021/22.

I have an eclectic/elastic interest in sociological and demographic questions around family, health & mortality, and social inequality. I am interested in how societies differ in who lives with whom, who gets how much of the good and bad stuff in life, and how (un)fortune in life is related to who your family are.

I am currently involved in the following projects:

1. In FAMSIZEMATTERS, an ERC-funded project of which I am the PI, we study various questions about the link between family size and (the reproduction of) social inequalities. Patrick Prag, Paula Sheppard, and Zachary van Winkle work on this project as post-doctoral researchers and Florianne Verkroost and Marianne Cunha write their DPhil within this project. Several other students are involved on data harmonization and review papers as Research Assistants.
2. CritEvents - Critical Life Events and the Dynamics of Inequality - is a Norface ERA-NET funded project, part of DIAL, with partners in Amsterdam (Leopold PI), Lausanne, Florence, and Stockholm. We study how the risk of and vulnerability to critical events - union dissolution and job loss - is socially patterned, how this has changed over time, and which social policies are relevant for these associations. In Oxford, I work with Lewis Anderson (Sociology) and Erzsebet Bukodi (Social Policy and Intervention) on this project.  
3. The Global Family Change project, spearheaded from Penn with partners in Oxford (Nuffield), CED/Barcelona, McGill/Montreal and Bocconi/Milan, explores the complex ways in which families are changing across low and middle-income countries.

I have had the privilege to work with wonderful students and postdoctoral researchers over the years.

Current PhD (DPhil) students:

• Florianne Verkroost
• Chris Jacobi
• Mariana de Araujo Cunha
• Carla Rowold
• Jiaxin Shi
• Shoudeng Zhang
• Alicia Garcia Sierra
• Morten Thomson
• Antonino Polizzi

Former PhD (DPhil) students:

• Jornt Mandemakers (Senior Researcher, Atlas voor Gemeenten)
• Usha Kanagaratnam (Senior Research Officer, Oxford Poverty & Human Development Initiative)
• András Vörös (Lecturer in Social Statistics, University of Manchester)
• Cecilia Potente (Postdoc, University of Zurich)
• Lewis Anderson (Postdoc, University of Oxford)
• Liliana Adriano (Postdoc, Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science)
• Pepita Barlow (Assistant Professor of Health Policy, LSE)

Current postdoctoral researchers:

• Nicole Kapelle
• Ryohei Mogi
• Lewis Anderson

Former postdoctoral researchers:

• Liliana Andriano (Postdoc, Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science)
• Seongsoo Choi (Assistant Professor of Sociology, Yonsei University)
• Deni Mazrekaj (Assistant Professor of Sociology, Utrecht University)
• Patrick Präg (Assistant Professor of Sociology, CREST/ENSAE)
• Paula Sheppard (Lecturer, University of Oxford)
• Zachary van Winkle (Assistant Professor of Sociology, Sciences Po)