Hans van Kippersluis, Associate Professor in health economics at Erasmus School of Economics, has won a grant of 525 thousand euros from the NORFACE research programme “Dynamics of Inequality Across the Life-course” (DIAL). This budget allows Van Kippersluis and the department of Applied Economics to attract two PhD candidates and one postdoctoral researcher.
Van Kippersluis’ research project is called GEIGHEI, Gene-Environment Interplay in the Generation of Health and Education Inequalities, which will be executed in close collaboration with Niels Rietveld (Erasmus School of Economics), Pietro Biroli (Universität Zürich), Stephanie Von Hinke (University of Bristol) and Tõnu Esko (University of Tartu). The research focuses on combining methods from genetics and social science to investigate the interplay between genes and the environment in producing inequalities in education and health outcomes.
Van Kippersluis: ‘What I like about this project is that we go beyond the old nature versus nurture debate. The development of health and human capital is not just nature or just nurture. We hypothesize that it is a complex interaction between your genes and the environment. For example, we will test whether high-quality child care can overcome genetic disadvantage in educational attainment.’
NORFACE has granted thirteen transnational research projects with in total 18 million euros). The thirteen teams with 56 principal investigators will be researching topics ranging from inequality and its consequences in education, child development, health, populism and LBTQ citizens, to employment and working life. In these projects, researchers from a wide variety of disciplines are working together across Europe, from Portugal to Finland and the Czech Republic to Ireland, and will look beyond Europe too.
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