Welcome!

I am a sociologist (Utrecht University, 2022), interested in questions around social and economic inequality. More specifically, I am intrigued by how different aspects of the life-course (e.g. family, institutions, policies and labor market) contribute to inequalities along the lines of ethnicity, education and gender.

I line with this academic interest, my PhD focuses on the ‘migrant pension penalty’: the higher poverty rates and lower pension incomes migrants receive upon retirement. In the Netherlands, about 40 percent of the non-Western retired migrants live below the poverty line compared to 6 percent of Western migrants and ‘only’ 3 percent of the non-migrant retirees. As this group of retired migrants is expected to grow at an unprecedented rate the coming decades, we aim to understand this inequality.

Methodologically, I study social inequalities using a combination of research methods. I did a systematic literature review, qualitative interviews, but also data-analysis on survey- and register data. In addition, I initiated, designed and coordinated the data collection of the Migrant Retirement Panel (MRP).

Currently, I am employed as a PhD candidate at the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI-KNAW)/RUG. My PhD-project is supervised by Frank van Tubergen, Jelle Lössbroek, and Kène Henkens and funded by Netspar (theme grant 2022-02). Please feel free to contact me in case you would like to collaborate or if you want to learn more about the migrant pension penalty.