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. Renske Verweij
Renske Verweij is a Postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Public Administration and Sociology (DPAS) of the Erasmus University Rotterdam. She is a family sociologist specifically interested in the experiences and consequences of parenthood among mothers and fathers.
More specifically, her research and teaching focuses on father involvement and the consequences of father involvement for their children, work-family conflict among mothers and fathers, the intergenerational transmission of inequalities and the pathways to childlessness.
Besides, she is interested in studying sociological topics from a behaviour genetics perspective, focusing both on genetic and socio-environmental influences and their interplay. She obtained her PhD at the University of Groningen in 2019 on the role genetic and social-environmental influences on childlessness.
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 a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Public Administration and Sociology at Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR). He is part of a research team lead by prof. dr. Renske Keizer and focusing on the role of fathers in child development. He also contributes as co-coordinator and lecturer to a course centring on social policy at the Master’s Social Inequality.
In 2019, he attained a PhD in Sociology and Social Research from the University of Trento and Tilburg University. He now routinely attempts to cross boundaries between scientific disciplines, with a special eye on economics and developmental psychology. His research deals with how parents and children fair in response to economic shocks 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.