I am a Professor of Sociology in the department of Sociology at the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR), part of the University of Amsterdam, and co-director of the Amsterdam Centre for Inequality Studies
Since 2020, I have been a member of The Young Academy (De Jonge Akademie) of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), and since 2022 I have been the vice-chair of The Young Academy. I am also an elected board member of the European Consortium of Sociological Research, a consortium consisting of 90 leading European research institutes and university departments across 26 European countries.
For up to date information about my research or publications, please go to www.thijsbol.com.
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 understanding how the linkage between school and work affects labor market outcomes in the short- and long term, or how scientists’ careers diverge. I also worked extensively on the effects of school closures on the inequality in educational opportunities.
In 2020 I received an ERC Starting Grant for CAREER, a project in which I aim to investigate how the changing labor market affects the career returns to general and vocational education. I am currently also involved in a large interdisciplinary Gravitation project (GUTS), and an NCO grant that facilitates data collection in the transition from primary to secondary school in the Netherlands.
At the University of Amsterdam I have developed and taught several courses in the BA (e.g., Introduction to statistics, Education and Work), in the MA (Advanced Quantitative Data Analysis, Master thesis supervision), and in the Research Master Social Sciences (Replication in Quantitative Social Sciences, Fixed and Random Effects, Thesis supervision). I have taught several courses on social stratification, inequality, research methodology, and quantitative methods. About teaching replication methods I have written an academic article in Teaching Sociology, together with Dragana Stojmenovska, who was a student in the first run of the course, and Thomas Leopold, with whom I developed the course.
I also supervise PhD theses. For more information, please see my CV.