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 an assistant professor at the Sociology department of Utrecht University. Her research focuses on the topics of data and methods quality. She is currently working on a project investigating the quality of non-traditional data sources and on a project related to climate change sociology. 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.
Erik-Jan van Kesteren
Dr. Erik-Jan van Kesteren is assistant professor of data science at Utrecht University, and the team lead for the ODISSEI Social Data Science team ([https://odissei-soda.nl/](https://odissei-soda.nl/)). His background is in social sciences and statistics, with a focus on computation; he has worked on a wide range of topics, such as structural equation modeling, high-performance computing, and Bayesian statistics. Erik-Jan is a strong proponent of open science, which he puts in practice in his projects with the SoDa team. There, he consults and works with many different researchers, on topics such as inequality, citizen science, agent-based modelling, and synthetic data.
Gert Stulp
Gert Stulp is an associate professor at the department of Sociology at the University of Groningen. He studies causes of the variation in the number of children people have and would like to have, and employs diverse methods in his research including personal network data collection, simulation studies, and machine learning. He is also interested in how methods from data science methods can improve the social sciences.