I am a PhD candidate in the programme group Institutions, Inequalities and Life courses (IIL) of the Department of Sociology at the University of Amsterdam. My research is conducted under the umbrella of the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR) and the Interuniversity Center for Social Science Theory and Methodology (ICS). My PhD project explores how organizational contexts shape discrimination and perceptions thereof in the labor market. I am supervised by Dr. Bram Lancee and Dr. Valentina Di Stasio.

Before starting my PhD, I studied at the University of Cologne, the University of Bradford, Utrecht University, and the University of Amsterdam. I hold a Bachelor’s degree in Social Sciences from the University of Cologne and a Research Master’s degree in Sociology and Social Research from Utrecht University.

I value active participation in the academic community. In 2021 and 2022, I served as PhD representative for the Institutions, Inequalities and Life courses (IIL) programme group, representing the interests of fellow doctoral researchers at the department- and faculty level.

Currently, I am a visiting the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute. I am also affiliated with the Research Professorship on Work, Family and Social Inequality at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center as a guest researcher. Previously, I was a guest researcher at the MIT Institute for Work and Employment Research at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

My PhD project is titled "Bringing the context back in: How national institutions and organizations shape ethnic discrimination in the labour market". Existing research unequivocally shows that employers discriminate against ethnic minorities on the labour market. Whereas researchers have focused on characteristics of job seekers, such as their skills, motivation, and work experience, in explaining discrimination in hiring and promotion decisions, this project aims to shed more light on how discrimination comes about in the workplace. As discrimination is a socially constructed process that is embedded in a larger institutional environment, this project considers organizations as opportunity structures which can nurture or prevent discrimination.

Organizational processes are studied by means of experimental data. Next to making use of data from the GEMM study, a cross-national correspondence study, my colleagues and I collected conjoint data on Human Resources, Hiring and Discrimination (HHD) in The Netherlands. I employ conjoint data to investigate support for diversity policies within organizations. The process of developing a survey experiment has made me curious about the suitability of survey experiments as tools to accurately measure discrimination. As a result, I am also interested in the methodological challenges of developing survey experiments.

Supervisors: dr. bram Lancee, dr. Valentina Di Stasio

I taught the courses Migration and Citizenship (BA Sociology), Social Research Methodology (BA Sociology) and Introduction to Statistics (BA Sociology).