I am Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology at the University of Amsterdam, where I am currently director of the MA program in Sociology. From 2020 to 2025 I was a member of The Young Academy (De Jonge Akademie) of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), and I served as its vice-chair from 2022 to 2024.

My research focuses on inequality in education, the labor market, and science. I want to understand how inequalities between groups arise, and why individuals with similar capacities end up having very different trajectories in their life courses. In my current research projects I am for example interested in how workplaces shape career inequality, and how scientists’ careers diverge. I also worked extensively on the effects of school closures for the inequality in educational opportunities.

My current research is funded by an ERC Consolidator Grant for FIRMS: How the Workplace Structures Career Inequality. In this project I study how firms shape people’s careers, and how they create or reinforce inequalities by gender and ethnicity. The project compares Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, and the United States, using linked employer-employee register data. Before FIRMS, I led the ERC Starting Grant project CAREER on the career returns to general and vocational education. I am also involved in a large interdisciplinary Gravitation project (GUTS), and an NRO grant to study selection in Dutch primary and secondary education.

On this website you will find my CV, my publications, and links to the replication files for my recent papers.