Members

André Berchtold

André Berchtold is Associate Professor in Statistics in the Institute of Social Sciences at the University of Lausanne. He teaches courses on quantitative methodology and statistics, as well as on substance use, for the BA and MA programs in social sciences. He has a PhD in economic and social sciences, with a specialization in econometrics and statistics, from the University of Geneva. He is also member of the National Centre of Competence in Research LIVES: Overcoming vulnerability, life course perspectives.

Research interests André Berchtold is an expert in statistics applied to the social sciences, and he is developing new methods for the treatment of missing data and for the modeling of longitudinal data using Markovian models. He also has special interest in data collection using life history calendars. In addition to theoretical developments, he also published many articles in the field of health, especially regarding adolescent health and substance use.

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Laura Bernardi

Laura Bernardi is Full Professor of sociology and demography of the life course at the Life Course and Inequality Research Centre (LINES) of the University of Lausanne. She is member of the Swiss National Research Council and of the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences. She is also co-Editor in Chief of the journal Advances in Life Course Research (https://www.journals.elsevier.com/advances-in-life-course-research) and President of the Scientific Council of the French Institut national d’études démographiques (INED). She teaches on migration, family and social policies, and life course theory. Before arriving to Lausanne, she worked at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, at the Brown University and at the University of Rome.

Laura Bernardi has extensively worked on fertility and family diversity in a life course perspective. She has directed and been involved in several projects on fertility and family, nationally and internationally, studying reproductive choices, intergenerational relationships, family norms, family structures and their consequences on wellbeing and vulnerability.

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Felix Bühlmann
Felix Bühlmann studied sociology and political sciences at the University of Geneva, the Humboldt University Berlin and the University of Lausanne. After his PhD at the University of Lausanne (2008), he was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Manchester and headed the Swiss social report at FORS. He has been assistant professor (2011) and then associate professor (2017) at the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Lausanne.

Felix Bühlmann is particularly interested in the sociology of the life course and in economic sociology. His research is about occupational careers, careers of vulnerability and about Swiss and international elites. He has published in the British Journal of Sociology, the European Sociological Review, Sociology and Economy and Society.

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Guy Elcheroth

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Jacques-Antoine Gauthier
Jacques-Antoine Gauthier is sociologist and a senior lecturer at the university of Lausanne (Unil). He teaches an introduction to social sciences research at the bachelor degree and a quantitative approach to the life course perspective at the master degree. Before working at Unil he was a scientific collaborator successively at the Swiss Federal Statistical Office, at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne and at Addiction suisse. He was also a Honorary Fellow of the University of Edinburgh from 2017 to 2018.

Research interests His research focuses on the ways in which life trajectories of women and men are shaped, in particular when experiencing transitions such as from school to work, to parentality or to retirement. He aims at uncovering the processes by which social institutions such as school, the family or the labor market anticipate and reproduce the systems of roles and values that form the frame for specific gender relationships. To do so, he is follwing a life course perspective that shows that individual trajectories are multidimensional, strongly interdependent and sensitive to the timing of events as well as to the context in which they take place.

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Lavinia Gianettoni
Lavinia Gianettoni is a social psychologist. Her research focuses on gender inequalities and their intertwining with other hierarchical social relationships (class, sexuality, nationality, religion, etc.). In her recent research, she has more precisely analysed how the gender, institutional and ideological system influences the career aspirations of young people at the end of their schooling. She is currently conducting longitudinal research to assess how the experience of sexist or homophobic discrimination impacts vocational training trajectories and the risks of disruption or drop-out that can result from it.

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Michael Grätz

Michael Grätz joined LINES at UNIL with an Ambizione grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation. In addition, he is a researcher at the Swedish Institute for Social Research (SOFI), Stockholm University. Before, he worked at Nuffield College, University of Oxford and at Bielefeld University. He received his PhD in Political and Social Sciences from the European University Institute (EUI) in 2015.

His research aims at understanding the intergenerational transmission of advantage. For this purpose, he conducts both descriptive studies estimating differences in social mobility across countries, over time, and between groups within societies as well as causal studies that identify the effects of institutions on social mobility. A particular emphasis of his work is on socioeconomic differences in the impact of demographic factors, such as parental separation, and differences between siblings on children. Furthermore, his research explores which mechanisms underlie the intergenerational transmission of advantage, in particular the contribution of parenting to this process.

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René Knüsel

René Knüsel has been an ordinary professor of sociology of social policies and social problems since 2004. After training in political science at the University of Lausanne, he taught, among other things, social policies at the University of Fribourg; he has collaborated with various health and social schools in French-speaking Switzerland. Among the approaches it has relied on is intervention research.

Her research focuses on a variety of social issues, including the issue of child abuse, career end-of-career issues, self-help groups. He has also developed research on the social and solidarity economy. His work also focuses on social and political minorities.

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Jean-Marie Le Goff

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Anne Marcellini
Anne Marcellini is Associate Professor in Sociology of Sport at the Life Course and Inequality Research Centre (LINES) of the University of Lausanne. She is in charge of the Master Degree in "Adapted Physical Activities and Health" of the Institute of Sport Sciences. She published Body, Sport, Handicaps. The handisport movement in the 21st century. Sociological readings (Téraèdre, 2014), and Disability, Recognition and "Community living". Diversity of practices and the benefits (Alter Review, European Journal of Disability Research, special issue, 2, 2018). Before coming to Lausanne, she headed the "Health, Education and Disabling Situations" research center of the University of Montpellier.

Expertise Anne Marcellini has worked since the 1990s on the process of social participation, social inclusion and identity construction of people with disabilities. She is a specialist in qualitative approaches of body practices and social uses of damaged bodies. Her research focuses since 2008 in the field of visual and filmic sociology.

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Davide Morselli
Davide Morselli's main research focus is on the psychosocial dynamics of social change and the effects of context on individual world-views and attitudes. He has been studying the psychosocial adaptation to critical life events and has been involved in the implementation of retrospective methods in survey designs to collect biographical data.

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Daniel Oesch
Daniel Oesch is associate professor at the Life Course and Inequality Research Centre (LINES) of the University of Lausanne and member of the NCCR LIVES. He teaches classes on social stratification and the life course, the labour market and employment policy. He is the author of two books: Occupational Change in Europe (2013, Oxford University Press) and Redrawing the Class Map (2006, Palgrave Macmillan). Before coming to Lausanne in 2010, he worked at the Universities of Geneva, Pompeu Fabra and Zurich. He has been involved in several large surveys on unemployment in Switzerland, studying the employment trajectories after mass displacement or the role of social contacts for the access to jobs.

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Caroline Roberts

Caroline Roberts is Assistant Professor in Survey Methodology. She is currently co-director of LINES, and is also in charge of the MA in Public Opinion and Survey Methodology, for which she teaches courses on survey research methods and questionnaire design. She also teaches quantitative methods for undergraduates. She has a PhD in Social Psychology and a MSc in Social Research Methods from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Prior to working at UNIL, she worked at the LSE, the UK’s Office for National Statistics, City University London, and Stanford University, as a survey methodologist in the coordinating teams of a number of large-scale social surveys.

Research interests Caroline’s main areas of expertise are in survey methodology and the measurement of social attitudes. Her research interests concern the optimisation of survey data collection protocols, and the measurement and reduction of different types of survey error, with a particular focus on methods to assess nonresponse error, and the antecedents of response errors. Her current research investigates the potential for incorporating smartphone app-based data collection in the context of web surveys of the general population, focusing especially on ways to address public concerns about data privacy and reduce respondent burden.

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Dario Spini
Dario Spini is full professor in social psychology and Director of the National Centre of Competence in Research LIVES. His main research interests are interdisciplinary life course research, social contexts and health, and identity processes.

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Stephanie Steinmetz

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Leen Vandecasteele

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Lena Ajdacic
Lena Ajdacic holds a research master degree in Social Sciences, with a specialisation in political economy and quantitative research methods from the University of Amsterdam. During the studies in Amsterdam she was embedded in the CORPNET research group. Currently, she is doing her PhD in the FNS project “The Rise of the Financial Elite – Access, Integration and Spread of Power" headed by Felix Bühlmann at the University of Lausanne.

Research interests Lena's main interests are in the field of economic inequalities, corporate power and network analysis. During her master thesis she focused on 'the wealth defense industry' surrounding international tax minimisation. In her PhD project she studies the networks and the modalities of influence of the global financial elite. She applies quantitative methods on economic datasets, which cover companies and top executives world-wide.

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Marc Asensio Manjon

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Fei Bian

Fei Bian joined LINES as a SNF doctoral student in October 2019. Before joining the Social Sciences department at the University of Lausanne, Fei Bian participated in the programme of the European Doctoral School of Demography in Denmark.  She holds a Master's degree in Social Sciences, focusing on Demography and Social Data, from the Université de Picardie Jules Verne in France.

Her research interests include family, gender and social inequalities. She is writing a thesis as part of the SNF project "Coupled Inequalities. Trends and differences between countries in the role of the partner's socio-economic resources in professional careers (COINEQ)".

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Jérôme Blondé

Jérôme Blondé completed his PhD in social psychology at the University of Aix-Marseille in 2015. He then moved at the department of psychology at the University of Sussex for 6 months to work as a post-doctoral fellow. In the fall of 2017, he came to the University of Geneva where he worked at the department of social psychology and applied psychology. He is still currently a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Geneva and concomitantly joined LINES as a senior FNS researcher since September 2019. 

His main research interests revolve around persuasion and social influence, health communication, identity processes in health behaviours and health inequalities, collective actions and justice processes, and discrimination against sexual minorities.

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Pierre Benz

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Danilo Bolano
Danilo Bolano is a demographer and social statistician. His main research interest is in life course research and in applying and developing advanced statistical tools to improve understanding of individual behaviors and attitudes. Danilo is interested in identifying and studying the impact of events and circumstances on life trajectories and decision-making process.

Danilo is currently Senior Researcher at NCCR LIVES.  He is affiliated at the ARC Life Course Center in Australia. Previously he was Research Fellow in Social Statistics at University of Queensland (AU).

Danilo hold a PhD in Social Science – Demography awarded at the University of Geneva (CH). He hold a BA and MSc in Economics and Social Science at Bocconi University (IT) with a master thesis on a comparative analysis of social norms in Europe.

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Chiara Comolli
Chiara Comolli joined LINES as Senior FNS Researcher in February 2019 to work in the WELLWAYS project. She graduated at Bocconi University in Economics and Social Sciences (MSc) in 2009 and obtained a PhD in 2016 from the European University Institute (EUI) in Sociology and Political Science with a dissertation on the effect of the Great Recession on fertility in advanced economies, entitled “Fertility in times of economic crisis”.

Within WELLWAYS, she investigates how critical life events and trajectories in the family and work domain simultaneously influence health and wellbeing trajectories in Switzerland and France. Her other research interests concern the effects of economic and employment uncertainty on family dynamics, especially regarding childbearing decisions and the mechanisms of transmission of insecurity from the work and financial domain to the family dimension.

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Ibrahima Dina Diatta
Ibrahima Dina Diatta is a PhD student at the Life Course and Inequality Research Centre in Lausanne. His research focus is on missing data, longitudinal analysis. The main objective of his doctoral thesis is the application of multiple imputation method in a longitudinal context. In addition, he works as a teaching assistant for the courses : quantitative methods and substance use : analyses of trajectories. Ibrahima Dina Diatta holds a master degree in Statistics from Neuchatel University and have practical experiences in clinical studiesand statistical analysis applied in the health related research.

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Alessandro di Nallo
Alessandro di Nallo is a social demographer who is interested in life course transitions, fertility and family economics. He is currently a researcher for the NORFACE-funded project CRITEVENTS, which investigates the consequence of job loss and separation on a variety of outcomes. His research also addresses the non-normative patterns of individuals’ life course, such as repartnering and multiple-partner fertility in the United States and in Europe. He has also investigated how parental social class influence the transition to adulthood in different contexts. Before joining UNIL in February 2018, Alessandro was a Doctoral Student in Socio-Demography at Pompeu Fabra University in Barelona. He achieved his PhD in February 2019. He holds a MSc in Economics and Social Sciences at Bocconi University in Milan, and a MA in Demography at Autonoma University in Barcelona. 

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Annahita Ehsan
Annahita Ehsan’s research centers on social relationships and health promotion. She is currently collaborating with a local community-based action research intervention to understand how social capital can be developed, and how this affects the wellbeing of older adults.

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Léïla Eisner
Léïla Eisner is a PhD student in Social Psychology at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. After the completion of her Bachelor in Political Science, Léïla graduated in Public Opinion and Survey Methodology at the Universities of Luzern, Neuchâtel, and Lausanne. From this interdisciplinary background, Léïla’s research interest broadly involves intergroup relations and discrimination, with an emphasis on social norms and support for social change movements in the LGBTIQ+ context. Furthermore, Léïla believes in bridging the gap between academia and the community, and strives towards diffusion of research findings among the general public.  

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Fabien Foureault

Fabien Foureault is a sociologist, working on the project “The rise of the financial elite” (Felix Bühlmann) as FNS senior researcher. After graduating from Sciences-Po in Paris, he completed a PhD at the same university in 2014 about the financialization of French firms, using the case of the surprising growth and controversial consequences of a take-over technique called the Leveraged Buy-Out (LBO).

His research interests lie in between economic sociology, organizational sociology and the sociology of elites. Fabien Foureault uses both qualitative and quantitative methods to study the structure, dynamics and regulation of collective action fields.

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Lucile Franz

Lucile Franz's research focuses on social policy in Vaud, with emphasis on policies concerning extreme poverty reduction. She conducts research in low-threshold reception centres in order to understand the different types of care available to the most vulnerable populations, which tend to oscillate between social services and security measures. 

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Dinah Gross

Dinah Gross is a sociologist and SNF researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lausanne and at the Service de la recherche en éducation (SRED, Geneva). She completed a degree in philosophy and a postgraduate degree in social sciences at the University of Geneva and was a member of LINES as a teaching assistant during five years. She has also been a researcher at the Haute école de travail social et de la santé (EESP) in Lausanne and SNF researcher at the Centre interfacultaire de gérontologie et d’étude des vulnérabilités of the University of Geneva.

Her research deals with the effects of gender and social origin on occupational representations, aspirations and trajectories in a life course perspective. Her current research in the framework of the project "Les parcours de formation professionnelle au prisme du genre et de l’orientation sexuelle" deals with gender-related discrimination in VET.

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Annika Lindholm

Annika Lindholm has a Master’s degree in the social sciences from the University of Geneva. She is currently doing a PhD in the field of electoral sociology. Her PhD project is focused on explaining the effect of subjective wellbeing on political behaviour and attitudes. She is also collaborating with FORS in providing support for comparative projects, notably the Comparative Candidate Survey (CCS) and MEDem.

Her main research interests include : political participation, political attitude-formation and preferences, the psychological determinants of radical voting, wellbeing theory, and cross-cultural research on political behaviour.

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Patrick McDonald
Patrick McDonald joined LINES as a teaching and research assistant in 2015 after completing a BA in sociology at the University of Melbourne and an MA in socioeconomics at the University of Geneva. His research is primarily focused on family dynamics and the labour market, particularly the effects of marriage and the arrival of children on labour force participation and remuneration. He is a part of the NCCR LIVES’s JOBVUL project, which seeks to study the recruitment behaviours of Swiss recruiters and employers through the use of a survey experiment.

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Jad Moawad

Since September 2018 Jad Moawad is a graduate assistant of Social Sciences at the University of Lausanne. Before joining the Social Sciences department at UNIL, he completed his studies at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. He obtained a Master in Political Philosophy that was focused on political and social theories and another Master in Sociology and Demography that was centred on quantitative research methods.

His research interests are quantitative research methods, social stratification, the Great recession, inter- and intragenerational transmissions and comparative labour market research. While recent research is analysing the repercussions of the 2007/2008 financial crisis, sociologists have neglected important questions related to the institutions that govern the amount and type of poverty and inequality generated by the Great Recession. His research aims to cover this gap.

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Sandrine Morel
After graduating from a Bachelor of Arts in social sciences (and psychology as a secondary discipline), Sandrine Morel pursued with a Master’s degree in social sciences (specific orientation : Life Course). Her master’s thesis was about shared custody in Switzerland from the point of view of fathers. She worked then as a junior research assistant on the SNSF Project « Gendered Globalisation of Legal Professions ». In her doctoral thesis, she studies the family and work trajectories of parents (of minor children) before and after their union dissolution. More specifically, Sandrine Morel wonders about the social norms regarding this transition. She also tends to choose a quantitative and qualitative approach in her research.

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Maud Reveilhac
After a Bachelor in Political Science at Lausanne University, Maud Reveilhac received her M.A. in Survey Methodology and Public Opinion from the Universities of Lausanne, Luzern and Neuchatel in February 2018. During her Mater Thesis, Maud Reveilhac chose a social psychology orientation. She focused on political behaviour with special interest on direct democracy and political institutions, especially Swiss politics. She started working at FORS as a scientific collaborator in April 2018. Her work involves survey preparation and management, as well as data preparation and analysis for repeated international surveys in Switzerland (especially the ESS) and for large-scale web surveys for SELECTS, as well as other projects at FORS. In April 2019, she started working as a graduate assistant at the Institute of social sciences. She is particularly interested in the development and challenges of new technology for conducting survey research and in the complementarity of social media data with traditional survey data. She is currently writing her PhD Thesis on the relationship between populism and direct democracy.

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Núria Sánchez-Mira

Núria Sánchez-Mira is Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lausanne. She was previously a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre d’Estudis Sociològics sobre la Vida Quotidiana i el Treball (QUIT), Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. She has been visiting fellow at the European Work and Employment Research Centre, University of Manchester, and the Soziologisches Forschungsinstitut Göttingen, Georg-August-Universität. She was awarded the Ángel Rozas Award to Research in the Social Sciences from the Cipriano García Foundation for her doctoral dissertation on the impact of the Great Recession on work–family arrangements across Europe.

Her research interests include the study of work and employment from a gender perspective, family diversity and family relations. She applies a life course perspective in her research, and is interested in the development of novel methodological approaches.

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Nicolas Sommet

Nicolas Sommet received his PhD in social psychology in 2014. After a first year of post-doctoral research at the University of Geneva, he obtained a grant to study the psychological consequences of income inequality at the University of Rochester, NY. Since 2016, he works as a Junior Researcher at the University of Lausanne. 

His research interests include the individual impact of income inequality (on health, well-being, social capital), the psychology of financial scarcity (having insufficient monetary reserves), as well as competitive and achievement motivation (e.g., the goal to outperform others). To address these issues, he mostly relies on primary and secondary longitudinal data and uses multilevel or fixed-effects modeling.

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Mattia Vacchiano

MA from the University of Bologna (2011) and PhD in Sociology by the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (extraordinary dissertation award 2016-2017), Mattia Vacchiano is currently senior SNF researcher at the Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research LIVES, and member of the Life Course and Inequality Research Centre of the University of Lausanne. As part of the project Incasi (European Union, Horizon 2020), in 2016 he has been visiting fellow in the University of Buenos Aires.

His current research addresses at theoretical level the relation between Life Course and Social Network Analysis. At empirical level, by means of a social capital lens he is addressing different phenomenon, such as labor precarization, the rise of social insecurities and the importance of leisure time for mental health. His methodological tools include both qualitative and quantitative techniques to analyze longitudinal, network and narrative data.

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Nathalie Vigna
Thanks to a bi-national course of study, Nathalie Vigna obtained the Master Degree in International Sciences at the University of Turin and the Master Degree in Comparative Political Sciences and Sociology of the Institut d’Etudes Politiques of Bordeaux. Then she collaborated to the research project ValOrienta of the University of Turin, focused on educational inequalities and on a project of school guidance for disadvantaged students.

She is now beginning a doctorate in the framework of the common scientific program FORS-SSP. Her research is about the evolution of inequalities and subjective social status; it is a comparison over time and space. Her research interests are social inequalities, life-course studies, sociology of education.

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Marion Beetschen

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Jessica Herzing

Jessica joined LINES as post-doc fellow in February 2019 to work together with FORS. She graduated from the University of Mannheim, Germany with a M.A. in Sociology after studying a year at the Indiana University, Bloomington, USA. Between 2013 and 2015 she worked for GESIS in the project CAMCES where she was involved in the development of innovative tools to measure education cross-nationally. From 2014 to 2018 she was a PhD student at the University of Mannheim, where she worked at the Collaborative Research Center “Political Economy of Reforms” in the team of the German Internet Panel (GIP).

Jessica’s PhD thesis was located in the field of survey methodology and investigates the impact of technological change on survey nonresponse and measurement. Her research concerns unit nonresponse in probability-based online surveys and measurement quality with regard to questionnaire design and mode effects. Current projects include studies examining the impact of technological change on survey research, responsive survey designs, nonresponse and measurement error in push-to-web and push-to-app surveys, and modular questionnaire designs. She is also co-editor of the FORS Guides.

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Steven Piguet

Steven Piguet studied Political Science and History at UniL (MA 2009). Since 2007, he has been woriking on the SNSF research project “Swiss Elites in the 20th century”.

He is also associated with the Observatory of Swiss Elites (Obelis) founded in 2015 and the technical platform of LaDHUL (PlaTec) since 2019.

Currently, he contributes to data management for the FNS projects “Financial elite,” “Rockefeller fellows,” “Local power structures and transnational connections”. He is also a research assistant at Geneva University in an ERC project on “Citizen Sciences”.

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Mina Rauschenbach

Mina Rauschenbach is a Lecturer at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lausanne and Research Associate at the Leuven Institute of Criminology (LINC) in Belgium. Her main areas of interest concern the role of victimhood as well as other relevant identity concerns in collective processes of memory-making, within the context of transitional justice and human rights violations. Her research focuses particularly on how these collective processes, and the power relations which are attached to these processes, shape various justice stakeholders’ (i.e. victims, perpetrators, diasporas) perceptions and needs in post-conflict contexts. Some recent publications include : Accused for involvement in collective violence : The discursive reconstruction of agency and identity by perpetrators of international crimes, published in Political Psychology (2015), The perfect data-marriage : Transitional Justice Research and Oral History Life Stories, published in the Transitional Justice Review (2016) or Individuals accused of international crimes as delegitimized agents of truth, published in The International Criminal Justice Review (2018).

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