Academic Profile

I work on sociological and demographic questions around family, health & mortality, and social inequality. In the most general sense, I am interested in how societies differ in who lives with whom, who gets how much of the good and bad things in life, and how (mis)fortune in life is related to family background.

My research agenda has evolved around several projects. In FamSizeMatters, an ERC-funded project for which I was the PI, we study questions about the link between family size and composition and the reproduction of social inequalities. Work is still ongoing on several papers from this project and on new spin-off projects.

Work on the Norface ERA-NET-funded project CritEvents - Critical Life Events and the Dynamics of Inequality - examined how the risk of and vulnerability to critical events - union dissolution and job loss - are socially patterned, how this has changed over time, and which social policies are relevant to these associations. In this project, our Oxford team (myself, Erzsébet Bukodi and Lewis Anderson) partnered with colleagues from Amsterdam, Cologne, Lausanne, Florence, and Stockholm.

A global view of family dynamics was central to the Global Family Change project. This project was spearheaded from Penn with partners in Oxford, Barcelona (CED), Montreal (McGill), and Milan (Bocconi) and explored the complex ways in which families are changing across low and middle-income countries. Finally, with Gilles Pison (INED, Paris) and Jeroen Smits (Nijmegen), I share a long-standing interest in the development of twin fertility and its related high infant mortality rates.

I have had the privilege of working with wonderful MSc, MPhil, and DPhil (PhD) students as well as postdoctoral researchers. Below is an overview of the DPhil students I have supervised and the postdocs I have had the pleasure of hiring for my projects. I believe it is important to make time to mentor and advise students and early-career researchers, also when they are not working on my grants or projects. My door (and inbox) is always open to informal enquiries.

I run a weekly writing and reading group ("DemSoc") for students, postdocs and early-career researchers, where we discuss work in progress, as well as grant and project proposals, presentations, posters and job talks. The reading group meets at 12 noon on Fridays during term time. Feel free to contact me if you are interested in joining.

For prospective students and visitors: please send me a short message and a concrete research proposal (preferably one page) to start a conversation.

Current DPhil students:

• Ruonan Ji (thesis submitted)
• Martin Gädecke
• Carla Grindel
• Elena Neri
• Sizhan Cui
• Jingying Wang (at the University of Zurich)
• Maela Guillaume-LeGall
• Martín Oscar Rosemblatt Meta (incoming cohort)
• Hlöðver Skúli Hákonarson (incoming cohort)

Former DPhil students:

• Jornt Mandemakers (Senior Researcher, Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute)
• Usha Kanagaratnam (Senior Research Officer, Oxford Poverty & Human Development Initiative / UNDP Malaysia)
• András Vörös (Associate Professor, University of Birmingham)
• Cecilia Potente (Assistant Professor, Erasmus School of Health Policy & Management)
• Lewis Anderson (Research Officer, Department of Social Policy and Intervention & Institute for New Economic Thinking, University of Oxford)
• Liliana Andriano (Lecturer in Social Demography & Global Health, University of Southampton)
• Pepita Barlow (Senior Economist, Amazon)
• Florianne Verkroost (Senior Data Scientist, Boston Consulting Group X)
• Chris Jacobi (Director of the German Council of Experts on Protection against Sexual Abuse and Experiences of Violence)
• Mariana de Araujo Cunha (Lecturer in Social Statistics, University of Manchester)
• Carla Rowold (Postdoctoral researcher, Hertie School in Berlin; thesis awards: thesis final nominee for Netspar Thesis Award 2024; Young Scientist Dissertation Award German Society for Demography 2026; FNA-Forschungspreis German Federal Pension Insurance 2026)
• Jiaxin Shi (Assistant Professor, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology; thesis awarded the Max Planck Society Otto Hahn Medal 2024)
• Shoudeng Zhang (Postdoctoral researcher, Peking University)
• Alicia García Sierra (Assistant Professor, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid; thesis awarded European Consortium for Sociological Research Dissertation of the Year 2023)
• Antonino Polizzi (Research Scientist & Deputy Head Population Health, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research)
• Morten Thomsen (PI & Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Department of Sociology & Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science, University of Oxford)
• Henrik Schubert (Research Scientist, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research; thesis awarded the Max Planck Society Otto Hahn Medal 2026)

Former Postdoctoral Researchers on my grants:

• Seongsoo Choi (Associate Professor of Sociology, Yonsei University)
• Liliana Andriano (Lecturer in Social Demography & Global Health, University of Southampton)
• Paula Sheppard (Lecturer in Anthropology, University of Oxford)
• Patrick Präg (Associate Professor of Sociology, CREST/ENSAE)
• Zachary van Winkle (Associate Professor of Sociology, Sciences Po)
• Ryohei Mogi (Fellow/Assistant Professor, Pompeu Fabra University/University of Southern Denmark)
• Lewis Anderson (Research Officer, University of Oxford)
• Deni Mazrekaj (Associate Professor of Sociology, Utrecht University)
• Nicole Kapelle (Assistant Professor, Trinity College Dublin)