Prof.dr. Renske Keizer
Renske Keizer (1983) is full professor in Family Sociology at Erasmus University Rotterdam. Keizer’s primary research interest is the role that families play in strengthening, maintaining or weakening social inequalities. Her research straddles sociology, pedagogical sciences, demography, and developmental psychology. Central to her work is the application of the theory-based life course approach to the behavior and well-being of individuals, and (extended) families. She has a demonstrated track record of significant contributions to multiple fields and to policy debates, through several highly-cited publications in top-tier journals, such as Journal of Marriage and Family, Journal of Family Psychology, Population and Development Review, European Sociological Review, and European Journal of Population. She has received several prestigious grants, amongst which an ERC Starting Grant, a NWO VENI and a NWO VIDI award. In 2016, she was selected as one of the 25 most talented young scholars of all Dutch and Flemish universities. Since 2019 she is member of the Young Academy, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences. In 2020 she won the Joannes Juda Groen Junior Prize (biannual) for excellent and innovative interdisciplinary research.
Prof.dr. Pearl Dykstra
Pearl Dykstra is Professor of Empirical Sociology at Erasmus University Rotterdam. Previously, she had a chair in Kinship Demography at Utrecht University and was a senior scientist at the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI) in The Hague. Her publications focus on intergenerational solidarity, family change, aging and the life course, comparative social and family policy, and late-life well-being.
She is particularly interested in the ways in which policy, economic, and cultural contexts structure interdependence in families.
She is the Scientific Director of ODISSEI, the Open Data Infrastructure for Social Science and Economic Innovations in the Netherlands. In 2016 she joined the board of the Social Sciences and Humanities division of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). She is an elected member and previous Vice-President of the Netherlands Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), fellow of the Gerontological Society of America, elected member of Academia Europaea, and elected member of the Governing Board of the International Science Council. In 2015 she was appointed as member of the group of European Commission Chief Scientific Advisors, and currently serves as its Deputy Chair.
Dr. Bonnie French
Dr. Bonnie French is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Erasmus School of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Erasmus University Rotterdam. Focusing on social inequalities, her research centers around race and racism in institutions such as schools and prisons. In recent work, Bonnie examines the differences between efforts toward “diversity” and progress toward racial equity. She is interested in the language and associated meaning of diversity and racial equity projects, how and by whom these projects are managed, and the extent to which these projects tangibly change institutions. Her work is strongly informed by Critical Race Theory.
Most importantly, Bonnie is committed to scholarship and teaching that investigates current social issues in an effort to understand and contribute to our societies.
Dr. Gabriele Mari
Gabriele Mari is Assistant Professor at the Department of Public Administration and Sociology at Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR). He contributes as co-coordinator and lecturer to a course centring on policy and inequalities at the Master’s Social Inequalities.
In 2019, he attained a PhD in Sociology and Social Research from the University of Trento and Tilburg University. His research deals with how parents and children fair in response to economic and policy changes and how, in turn, family formation has economic consequences, disparate for women and men. His key interest throughout is in evaluating the effects of social policies and in the application of statistical methods for causal inference. He has published in a number of peer-reviewed outlets and he is committed to open science, sharing code and open-access versions of his work.