Berkay Özcan
Berkay Özcan is a Professor of Social Research and Public Policy at New York University (Abu Dhabi) and has held faculty positions at the London School of Economics (LSE), where he has been a Professor of Social and Public Policy and Co-Director of the Women in Social and Public Policy Research Hub (WiSPPRH). Before joining LSE in 2011, he worked as a post-doctoral researcher at Yale University. Berkay held visiting positions at Princeton (2006), Essex (2007), Oxford (2015), and UCL (2017, 2023). Berkay received his PhD in Political and Social Sciences from Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona) after an MSc in Economics from the same university.
Berkay’s research is interdisciplinary and has appeared in leading journals like Annual Review of Sociology, PNAS, Journal of Human Resources, and Demography. He’s featured in over 60 media outlets, including The New York Times, Daily Mail, El Pais and Huffington Post, and interviewed on BBC, CTV, iTV, and Irish Radio.
Berkay is an elected board member of RC28 Social Stratification and serves on the editorial board of Research in Social Stratification and Mobility. He’s been an Advisory Board member of NYU Tulsa, and MiSOCat Essex University, a founding member of International Inequalities Institute (III), and affiliate of CASE at the LSE. He is an external Fellow of CReAM, UCL. He also consulted IOM of the UN, the European Investment Bank, Public Health England, and the UK Ministry of Justice.
Updates
[Here below is my itinerary for the next 6 months or so — please come say hello if you think our paths may cross in any of these occasions]
- I will be attending the PAA 2025 Annual Meeting from April 10-13 in Washington, DC. I will serve as a chair and/or discussant for session 702 – Education and Inequality in Low- and Middle-Income Countries. Additionally, I will present my paper titled “Gifts as Binding Signals” in session 306-1 – Intergenerational Mobility and Transfers. My co-author, Aya Aboulhosn, will present our joint work, “Forced Migration and Natives’ Fertility”, in session 915 – Migration, Fertility, and Reproductive Health. Sergio Perez Schjetnan will present our joint paper, “Do Social Pensions Affect Social Capital?”, in session 104 – Social Isolation Across the Life Course. If you’re attending the PAA this year, please stop by our sessions and say hello!
- I am excited to be co-organizing a conference with Jan O. Jonsson and Kristian Karlsson at Nuffield College, of Oxford University, on May 1-2, 2025, to celebrate Richard Breen’s outstanding contributions to sociology as part of his retirement celebrations. Let’s meet if you are around in Oxford those days.
- May 29-30: I will be presenting my work on “Individualism Culture in Research Dissemination” (Co-authored with Chiara Orsini, Valentina Contreras, and Paola Giuliano) at the Culture and Inequality Conference (Three NYUs Conference) in New York.
- On June 2-3, 2025, I will participate in the 7th EBRD and CEPR Research Symposium on “The Economics of Demographic Change”, where I am also part of the organizing committee. I will be discussing a paper.
- Don’t forget to submit your articles by June 15th, 2025, to the special issue of the European Sociological Review,which I will be co-editing,to honour Richard Breen’s contributions to sociology, with a focus on social stratification, mobility, social demography, and methodology. Submit your articles here [i.e. as a standard article, but please clearly indicate the special issue in your cover letter].
- I will be in Barcelona between June 17-20 at the “Fundacion La Caixa” and “Universitat Pompeu Fabra” for a series of events.
- Register for the LSE Summer School between 4 Aug 2025 – 22 Aug 2025, where I will be teaching EC210: Inequality and Poverty Analysis.