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.
Elizaveta Sivak
Elizaveta Sivak is a sociologist and a computational social scientist. Currently, she is a PhD candidate at the University of Groningen, where she studies the predictability of fertility outcomes. Before that, she was the head of the Center for Modern Childhood Research at HSE University. Her research interests involve the predictability of life outcomes, predictions in social science in general, and using machine learning methods and digital traces data to study parenting and childhood.Speakers
Teaching Assistants
Participants
Lucas Spierenburg
Lucas Spierenburg is a PhD candidate at the TU Delft assessing the impact of urban policies on residential segregation patterns. In his current research, he uses unsupervised learning to delineate demographically homogeneous regions from spatial data and assesses how these regions relate to local urban development.
Tony Wei-Tse Hung
Currently a PhD student at Maastricht University, exploring the various possibilities between climate resilience and data science. He received his master's degree in Environmental Economics and Climate Change from the London School of Economics as well as a European Master's degree in Official Statistics from the University of Economics, Prague.
Hanna Schleihauf
Hanna Schleihauf is an Assistant Professor at Utrecht University. She studies how people across the world transmit behaviors and beliefs between one another and hopes to investigate the influences of direct and indirect exchange on the spread of knowledge and beliefs within the online environment in the future. She also runs non-invasive cognitive studies with chimpanzees in Uganda and Kenya to unravel what makes human cognition unique.
Lotte Schrijver
Lotte Schrijver is a PhD Candidate at Erasmus University Rotterdam and Wageningen University. She studies misinformation during the Covid pandemic. Her current research focuses on training a machine learning model to detect misinformation about Covid on Twitter. Her interests include political communication and science communication, and computational social science.
Vardan Barsegyan
Vardan is a scientific researcher at the Research and Documentation Centre (WODC) - the knowledge centre of the Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security (The Hague, the Netherlands). In 2019-2023, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the department of sociology at Utrecht University (Utrecht, the Netherlands). He obtained his PhD degree in political science in Moscow in 2016. His research interests are political and social inequality, asylum and migration studies, and criminal behavior.
Žiga Puklavec
Žiga is a PhD candidate at the Department of Social Psychology at Tilburg University. He is interested in the psychology of taxation, mainly evolving around morality, social norms, emotions, and attitudes towards paying taxes. His research methods include laboratory experiments (emotion induction, electrodermal activity, eye-tracking), analysing large archival data, and natural language processing.
Marie Labussière
Marie Labussière is a postdoctoral researcher in sociology at the University of Amsterdam. Her current work is part of the CAREER ERC-project, which focuses on the employment trajectories of workers in the context of changing labour markets. Using job advertisement data and machine learning techniques, she explores new ways to map the skill content of the labor market.
Xiao Xu
Xu Xiao is a PhD candidate at the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI). His research focuses on the application of computational methods in demography. Before working at NIDI, Xiao completed a joint research master in Computational Linguistics at the University of Groningen and the University of the Basque Country.
Alon Pertzikovitz
Alon Pertzikovitz is a PhD candidate at the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute and the University of Groningen. He holds a Master’s degree in Demography from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a European Research Certificate of Demography from the European Doctoral School of Demography. Alon’s PhD dissertation explores patterns and processes of childhood migration and focuses on the nexus between migration in childhood and later life demographic outcomes.
Samuel Plach
Samuel Plach is a doctoral student in Social and Political Science at Bocconi University, Milan, and works at the Dondena Centre for Research on Social Dynamics and Public Policy. He holds a BSc in Economics and Business Science from University of Konstanz and a MSc in Economics and Social Sciences from Bocconi University. His research, published in leading journals including Science, PNAS, and PDR, focuses on Social and Institutional Demography, Social Network Analysis, and Social Mobility.
Dianna Amasino
Dianna has a PhD from Duke University in cognitive neuroscience and is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam in the economics department. She measures attention (using eye-tracking or mouselab) to better understand the process by which people make decisions with social and ethical implications.
Huyen Nguyen
Huyen Nguyen is an interdisciplinary researcher with research interests in natural language processing, applied econometrics, and the economics of discrimination. Her research combines NLP tools, survey experiments, and micro-econometric techniques to understand differences in self-presentation strategies in competitions and recruitment contexts; and their impacts on evaluations across genders and ethnicities.
Tomas Turner-Zwinkels
Tomas Turner-Zwinkels is a socially engaged quantitatively minded political sociologist that loves bad ideas. Keen on exploring and teaching how to tackle policy issues with theoretical scrutiny, exciting data and rigorous quantitative methodology. Graduated with the highest honours (summa cum laude) from his research master at the ICS in Groningen. Wrote his PhD, titled 'A New Macro-Micro Approach to the Study of Political Careers: Theoretical, Methodological and Empirical Challenges and Solutions' at the University of Groningen. After working at the University of Basel (Switserland) on a large comparative research project on political careers, he recently started as an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Tilburg. He is a member of the Dutch National Think Tank.
Emily Cantrell
Emily Cantrell is a doctoral student in Sociology and Social Policy at Princeton University. Her current research examines what types of life experiences are most predictable using machine learning algorithms with social survey data. Upcoming work will examine how data distribution shifts impact predictive algorithms in child protective services.
Francesco Marolla
Francesco Marolla is a Joint PhD researcher for the University of Trento (Italy) and Tilburg University (The Netherlands). In his PhD Thesis, he works on European surveys (e.g., EVS, ESS, EES), particularly focusing on citizens' support for populist parties and populist attitudes. He aims to find individual and contextual factors that explain support for populism across European countries. The focus is on voters' grievances, institutional factors and party competition. Other research interests are on Voting behaviour, Electoral biases, Digital Democracy, and COVID-19 rule compliance.
Laura Jansen
Laura Jansen is a PhD student in Economics at the University of Groningen. Her research lies within the field of health and labour economics. She is currently investigating employer incentives' effects in the Dutch sick leave and disability insurance system. Besides, she has a great interest in computational economics and is planning to create a structural model of the Dutch disability insurance system.
Santiago Gómez-Echeverry
Santiago is a PhD candidate at the Department of Sociology of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. His current research focuses on modeling and assessing the quality of non-probabilistic and Big Data sources. He has a strong passion for applied statistics, particularly Survey Statistics, Public Policy Evaluation, Bayesian Statistics, and Psychometrics.
Ely Strömberg
Ely Strömberg is a PhD candidate at the department of Sociology at the University of Amsterdam, and the ICS. Their PhD project investigates cumulative and structural forms of discrimination. Their research interest include discrimination, labour market relations, intergenerational inequality, research robustness, and Critical theory.