People
Faculty
Tom Emery
Dr. Tom Emery is the Deputy Director of ODISSEI, where he is responsible for the strategic development of the infrastructure and international collaborations. Emery is an Associate Professor in the Department of Public Administration and Sociology of Erasmus University Rotterdam. Before that, he was the Deputy Director of the Generations and Gender Programme (GGP) at the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute in The Hague. Emery gained a PhD in Social Policy from the University of Edinburgh in 2014 and his thesis examined the interaction between financial support between elderly parents and their adult children in a number of European countries. His research also covers questions of comparative survey methodology and policy measurements in multilevel contexts.
Paulina Pankowska
Dr. Paulina Pankowska is a postdoctoral researcher at the Sociology and Communication Science Departments of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her research focuses on the topics of data and methods quality. She is currently involved in an ERC project investigating the problem of measurement error in the context of career and employment trajectories. She is also the task leader of the ODISSEI benchmarking task, which aims to organize an algorithm benchmark for the social sciences. The overarching goal of this project is to guide social science research towards a culture wherein different methods and techniques that are used to solve a specific problem are compared and evaluated objectively.
Javier Garcia-Bernardo
Dr. Javier Garcia-Bernardo is an assistant professor at Utrecht University in the Social Data Science (SoDa) team. Before that, he was a postdoc at the University of Amsterdam and at Charles University (CORPTAX), and a data scientist at the Tax Justice Network. In his research he applies computational models to understand social and economical systems. He completed his PhD in Political Economy at the CORPNET group (University of Amsterdam), and his MSc in Computer Science at the University of Vermont.
Adriënne Mendrik
Adriënne is CEO and Co-Founder of EYRA, a company that develops sustainable onine platforms to support open and FAIR science. Adrienne has significant expertise in deploying platforms for the evaluation of benchmarking challenges and more broadly in collaborating with scientists in the development of research software. She holds a PhD in Biomedical Imaging from the University of Utrecht.
Suze Zijlstra
Dr. Suze Zijlstra is Community Manager of ODISSEI. She is responsible for communications, organising events, and the coordination of the educational programme of ODISSEI. In June, she will be coordinating the practical side of SICSS-ODISSEI. You can reach her through suze@odissei-data.nl.Speakers
Adriana (Anda) Iamnitchi
Anda is Professor and Chair of Computational Social Sciences in the Institute of Data Science at Maastricht University since August 2021. Anda has been trained as a computer scientist with a PhD and MS from University of Chicago. Until recently, she was Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at University of South Florida. Her research trajectory led from distributed computing (such as decentralized management of user data) to computational social sciences (such as modeling information diffusion in social media and identifying patterns of information operations). She has been awarded various professional recognitions such as National Science Foundation Career Award and ACM Distinguished Member
Eszter Bokányi
Eszter is a research postdoc in the POPNET project investigating a population-scale social network of the Netherlands. She has a background in physics and graduated with a PhD from statistical physics at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. The topic of her thesis was already rather connected to computational social science, having investigated a huge database of geolocated Twitter messages. She is still mostly interested in spatial social networks and their connection to human mobility, as well as dynamic phenomena such as the spreading of innovations over these social networks.
Wouter van Atteveldt
Wouter is a leading computational communication scientist, developing and using state of the art computational communication science techniques. Combining these computational techniques with traditional panel survey methods allows studying the effect of individual media diets, for example in the recent Dutch parliamentary elections. Wouter is an interdisciplinary scientist by training, having received his M.Sc. in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh and a joint Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence and Communication Science from the VU Amsterdam. Wouter is a leading Communication Science Scholar who co-founded and chaired the Computational Methods division in the international scientific association ICA. He founded and is editor-in-chief of a new open access journal called Computational Communication Research published by Amsterdam University Press and sponsored by multiple international universities.
Joris Mulder
Joris works as a senior survey researcher at Centerdata and is the Coordinator of the LISS panel. Joris was trained in computer science and graduated in Social and Economic Psychology (MSc.) from Tilburg University in 2010. After graduating, he continued studying data science. As a social and economic psychologist with an affinity for technology and data science, Joris has knowledge of human behavior within socio-economic decision-making processes and specific technical knowledge and experience with the implementation and management of extensive and innovative research projects, applying various forms of research methods (e.g. online survey research, (mixed-mode) experiments, face-to-face interviews and (online) focus groups and data science techniques).
Nate Breznau
Nate is Principal Investigator & Postdoctoral Researcher at the SOCIUM Research Center on Inequality and Social Policy at the University of Bremen. Nate is a leading advocate for open and reproducible science, as well as a political scientist focusing on the relationship between public opinion and social policy. Nate attained his PhD in Sociology from the University of Bremen in 2013.
Matthew Salganik
Matthew Salganik is Professor of Sociology at Princeton University, and he serves as the Director of the Center for Information Technology Policy. His research interests include social networks and computational social science. He is the author of Bit by Bit: Social Research in the Digital Age. Salganik's research has been published in journals such as Science, PNAS, Sociological Methodology, and Journal of the American Statistical Association. Popular accounts of his work have appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Economist, and New Yorker. During sabbaticals from Princeton, he has been a Visiting Professor at Cornell Tech, a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research, and Professor in Residence at the New York Times.Teaching Assistants
Participants
Hekmat Alrouh
Hekmat Alrouh is a PhD candidate in Behavioral Genetics at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. His research focuses on the intergenerational transmission of obesity and its relationship to educational attainment. A medical doctor by training, he aims to bridge the gaps between the medical and behavioral disciplines to better understand the causes and consequences of obesity.Lianne Bakkum
Lianne Bakkum is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Clinical Child and Family Studies, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She holds a PhD in Public Health and Primary Care from Cambridge University. Her research interests include child development, intellectual disability, youth care, and use of routine care data.
Dominika Czerniawska
Dominika Czerniawska is a postdoc at Leiden University, Science Based Business working on an ERC project about international scientific consortia (e.g.Human Brain Project). She is a sociologist, a social network analyst, and an art historian trained in Manchester and Warsaw. In her research, she tries to disentangle the mechanisms behind mutually-reinforcing powers of social networks, scientific institutions, and core-periphery structures. She has done research on gender and networks showing the discrepancy of network composition and structure.
Kasimir Dederichs
Kasimir is a DPhil candidate in Sociology at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. In his thesis, he examines inequalities in voluntary involvement as well as the role of voluntary organizations and volunteer work for social capital and social cohesion. His joint article with Hanno Kruse, entitled "Who stays involved? - A Longitudinal Study on Adolescents' Participation in Germany" was recently published in the European Sociological Review. He holds a Bachelor and a Master degree from the University of Cologne.
Melisa Lucia Diaz Lema
Melisa Diaz is a postdoctoral fellow at Politecnico di Milano. She is currently collaborating with the Amsterdam Centre of Learning Analytics at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. Her most recent work explores data analytics techniques for supporting educational decision-making processes, developing early warning systems for detecting at-risk students and evaluating the effectiveness of educational interventions.
Reshmi Gopalakrishna Pillai
Reshmi is a Lecturer at the Informatics Institute, University of Amsterdam. She holds a PhD from the University of Wolverhampton for her thesis on the expressions of psychological stress in tweets. Her research interests are in analyzing language using natural language processing methods for a better understanding of behaviors and states of individuals and the society.
Gita Huijgen
Gita Huijgen is a first-year PhD student in sociology at Erasmus University Rotterdam. She examines the interrelations of public care provision, family solidarity and community cohesion, for which she intends to use computational methods. She obtained a MSc and a BSc in sociology at Radboud University.
Kyri Janssen
Kyri Janssen is a PhD student at Delft University of Technology, with an educational background in spatial economics, human geography, and international development studies. Her research examines state-led gentrification and how this shapes residential mobility of individual households within and between cities of the Netherlands.
Ranran Li
Ranran Li is pursuing a PhD in Personality Psychology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She adopts multiple methods in her study of person-situation interactions (incl. scale development, meta-analysis, diary study, multilevel modeling, network analysis, machine learning). She is keen on applying CSS methods to advance the study of personality/social psychology.Cecil Meeusen
Cecil Meeusen is Assistant Professor in sociology and social data science (tenure track since October 2020) at the Institute of Social and Political Opinion Research (ISPO) of the Center of Sociological Research (CeSO) at the KU Leuven. Her research draws on surveys, survey embedded experiments and geospatial indicators to analyze how social and political attitudes of native majority and ethnic minority citizens may radicalize.
Marilù Miotto
Marilù is a research master in social and behavioural sciences at Tilburg University. She holds a BA in International Relations from University of Trento and a MSc in International Security Studies from Charles University, Prague. While studying at Charles University Marilù collaborated with Periculum, a collaborative research hub dedicated to the study of artificial intelligence, security order, and radicalisation as present manifestations of future challenges. Her actual studies focus on developing NLP methods to detect radicalisation processes.
Anne Maaike Mulders
Anne Maaike is a PhD Candidate in sociology at the Radboud University in Nijmegen. Her research investigates career inequalities in Dutch academia along the lines of gender and ethnicity. Specifically, she is interested in how professional networks can hinder or promote science careers of women and ethnic minorities.
Daniela Negoita
Daniela Negoita is a Junior Researcher at the European Values Study at Tilburg University. She holds a MSc in Sociology and Social Research from the University of Trento. Her research projects revolve around survey data, their harmonization and analysis, along with leveraging the FAIRification of research outputs.
Cecilia Potente
Cecilia Potente is a postdoctoral scholar at the Jacobs Center for Productive Youth Development, University of Zurich, where she studies how socioeconomic status is associated with gene expression in the form of mRNA. Her research interests are in Demography, Sociogenomics, Sociology, Life-Course Research, and Health Inequalities in general. She carried out her PhD research in the Department of Sociology and Nuffield College at the University of Oxford. As part of her doctoral studies, she examined different aspects of the socioeconomic inequality in health and mortality starting from the gradient in disability trajectories before death to the causal effect of education on cancer incidence and mortality. Before joining the PhD, she completed Master and Bachelor degrees in Economics and Social Sciences at Bocconi University, Milan.
Mikhail Sirenko
I am a Postdoc Researcher on the Horizon 2020 project HERoS at the Delft University of Technology. I have a background in data science which I recently enhanced with simulation & modelling for policy analysis. I aim to understand how cities recover, adapt, or transform in the face of uncertain future events like pandemics, heatwaves, or segregation.
Jarik Stam
At the time of writing I am in the final phase of the Social Sciences Research Master at the University of Amsterdam, before which I completed the Sociology Bachelor at the VU Amsterdam. During these studies I have developed a strong interest in using computational methods to answer research questions about cultural causes of differences and developments in behaviors and attitudes.
Willem Vermeulen
Willem is pursuing a PhD at the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI-KNAW & UMCG). He has a MSc in Computational Science and BSc in Computer Science. Following his strong interest in human demographics and behaviour he currently researches union dissolution patterns in the Netherlands.
Kevin Wittenberg
Kevin Wittenberg is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Utrecht University. His research focusses on collective action and cooperation. As a part of a transdisciplinary program, he studies the emergence and sustainability of citizen collectives for healthcare in the Netherlands. Additionally, he is interested in the integration of machine learning techniques and large social network data into traditional social sciences paradigms.