Brigitte Schels has been Professor of Empirical Social Structure Analysis in the department since 2024. She previously held the positions of Senior Researcher at the Institute for Employment Research (IAB) in Nuremberg, and Assistant Professor of Labor Market Sociology at Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg (FAU). She was Visiting Professor of Social Stratification and Quantitative Methods at the University of Vienna. She studied social sciences at FAU and completed her doctorate thesis at the University of Mannheim.
Her research is centered on the (re-)production of social inequalities in the labor market and in the household. In particular, her research interests include school-to-work transitions, occupational choices, occupational gender segregation and gender inequalities in employment, as well as the determinants and consequences of poverty and social exclusion.
In her teaching, she is focused on providing students the opportunity to engage with pressing issues of social inequality in contemporary societies theoretically as well as empirically and to develop ideas for their own research agenda and sociopolitical discussion.
