Visiting PhD Students

Visiting scholars have access to a desk in a shared open workspace, along with access to the internet, library, and Sciences Po's numerous resources.

Visiting scholars have also the opportunity to present their work in a research seminar, collaborate with other members of CRIS, and benefit from discussing ongoing research projects. They are expected to interact with CRIS faculty and doctoral students and participate in the regular life of the center, including attending the weekly research seminar.

CRIS is unable to provide funding for visiting researchers; however, a visitor may benefit from external funding.To apply to be a visiting scholar at CRIS, please make contact ahead of time with a researcher at CRIS who fits your research area, as the CRIS faculty member will be your host. If the CRIS faculty member is available to act as your host, please fill out this form. Then, your application will be examined by the CRIS board, which usually meets every six weeks and, if it is approved, you will be issued an invitation letter. Please make sure to apply at least 4 months before the start of the visiting stay. Download here the Form of Undertaking for Visiting Scholars (pdf)

Last PhD Candidates welcome in the CRIS

Roberta Cipriano work focuses on applied social statistics, in particular the analysis of students’ trajectories and performance and the evaluation of social and higher education policies. She is affiliated with the University of Siena and collaborates with the University of Florence in research projects on social inequalities and education. Visiting from May 2nd to July 31th, 2026. Host supervisor: Carlo Barone. 

Ricardo Quintero Carrizosa is a PhD candidate (FPU fellow) in Sociology, Sociological Research Centre on Everyday Life and Work (QUIT), Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. His research focuses on intergenerational social mobility and class inequalities, analysing life-course trajectories from a comparative perspective. He examines how gender, social origin, and working conditions jointly shape occupational careers and social positions, drawing primarily on quantitative and comparative methods. Visiting from February 2nd to April 30th, 2026. Host supervisor: Ettore Recchi, under the INCASI 2 programme.   

Temi Alao is a sociology PhD candidate at Emory University whose research examines status hierarchies among Black populations, linking ethnoracial stratification, immigration, and diaspora between the United States and Europe, especially France. Her dissertation, on “Hierarchies of Black France”, investigates how status beliefs about Black immigrants from the United States, francophone Africa, and the Caribbean shape their economic incorporation and mobility in Paris and Montpellier. More broadly, her work adopts a Du Boisian and racial capitalism perspective to show how macro‑level structures produce lived inequalities, identities, social networks, and political behavior among marginalized groups. Visiting from March 5th to June 30th, 2026. Host supervisor: Mirna Safi.

Caroline Cros is a PhD researcher in sociology at the European University Institute (Florence), studying how social origins and genetic factors jointly shape individuals’ socioeconomic trajectories and outcomes. Her work is embedded in the EUI Department of Political and Social Sciences’ research agenda on social stratification, inequality, and life‑course processes. Visiting from Avril to June 2026. Host supervisor: Zachary Van Winkle. 

Cristina Specchi is a PhD candidate in Public Governance, Management and Policy at the Department of Economics of the University of Bologna, working on the economics of education and educational inequalities, especially in secondary and higher education. Her research examines how public policies can reduce these inequalities, combining quantitative methods (causal inference, experiments, large administrative datasets) with qualitative approaches such as policy analysis, interviews, and engagement with education stakeholders. Visiting from November 1st, 2025 to April 30th, 2026. Host supervisor: Carlo Barone. 

Melissa Evangeline (« Evie ») Lopoo is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Northwestern University (Chicago), affiliated with the Institute for Policy Research and the Center for Neighborhood Engaged Research and Science (CORNERS). Her research examines mass incarceration, surveillance, and public safety policy in the United States, focusing on how penal institutions such as prisons, probation, and policing reshape work, life trajectories, and racialized social inequalities through mixed‑methods research and neighborhood‑based data.  Visiting from January 1st to June 30th, 2026. Host supervisor: Magda Boutros. 

Sarah Berkinshaw is a PhD student in Sociology at the University of Zurich, working in the SNSF project “Labour Markets as Emergent Mobility Networks”, which analyses labour markets as social mobility networks. Her research focuses on social stratification and mobility, investigating the causes, processes, and consequences of social mobility using quantitative methods and social network analysis. CRIS visiting from January 19th to July 19th, 2026. Host supervisor: Carlo Barone. 

Veronica Mesina, is a PhD candidate at the University of Pisa (Italy), and also research affiliate to the KDD-Lab (ISTI-CNR). She investigates the silent majority on social media, users who stay neutral in polarized debates, framing their soilence as a socially grounded strategy tied to identity and symbolic capital". 
Visiting at CRIS between October 1st 2025 and February 28th 2026.

Haohao Lei, is welcomed within the OxPo academic exchange network (Sciences Po & University of Oxford), 3 months, between January & April 2025. 

Haohao is currently working on the second chapter of his DPhil thesis, which explores the integration of social sequence analysis into the study of deaths of despair and U.S. mortality—an area that remains largely unexamined. His research applies sequence analysis to Health and Retirement Study life history data to investigate whether individuals’ family formation and employment trajectories have increasingly diverged from the traditional life course patterns of the 1950s in the U.S. and whether this shift contributes to mortality inequality and deaths of despair. 
He is also refining his first chapter, which aims to develop a more suitable indicator for deaths of despair research by applying methods derived from sequence analysis. 
Additionally, he is engaged in a side project based on his MPhil thesis, which examines the strength of the association between fertility and employment across the life course in different European countries. Furthermore, he currently has an article under review that tests the country-level U-shaped relationship between gender equality and fertility.

Abraham García González, FPU PhD candidate, Autonomous University of Barcelona (Centre for Sociological Studies on Everyday Life and Work QUIT - Institute for Labour Studies). His thesis deals with the relationship between social inequality (observed from the social mobility approach) and health for the Spanish population in recent years. Having evaluated the socioeconomic and health factors descriptively, associatively and causally, he is currently at Sciences Po Paris completing the fourth chapter of the thesis results, focused on implementing a structural equation model (SEM) that summarises the interaction effects of each variable and helps to explain the mechanisms behind social inequalities in health. Visiting September 16th-December 15th. To find out more

Jianji Chen, PhD Student in Demography at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. He's working on the economic wellbeing of older widows/ers. Visiting between March 1st and April 30th 2024 on the Supervision of Zachary Van Winkle.

Aya Jibet, PhD Student in Economics at New York University (Chateaubriand Fellowship Program & GRI Research Fellow). Visiting2023-2025. Her research focuses on the economics of education and labor economics. She is interested in the relationship between access to higher education, inequality, and social mobility. Evaluating the effects of the Priority Education Convention program at Sciences Po: an affirmative action program in the French higher education context. 

Flavia Couto e Silva, Bachelor Student at University of Sao Paulo. Partnership  Sciences Po and  Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas. Scholarship Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo - FAPESP. Research Visiting between 1st September and 31th December 2023 under the supervision of Yann Renisio.

Arno Yeramyan, PhD Student in Sociology, University of Milano Bicocca. Visiting during one year between September 2023 and September 2024, under the supervision of Angela Greulich. He conducts a thesis titled Turkish Women and Labor Participation: A Comparative Study of Migrant Turkish Women in France and Their Non-Migrant Counterparts in Turkey. He plans to carry out qualitative interviews in the greater Paris region and to follow Sciences Po courses on labor markets, research methods and migration.

Austin Vo, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Visiting between March 2023 and March 2024. Centering the perspectives of Vietnamese and Senegalese political actors, his project explores internal divisions regarding self-determination and membership in the colonial French empire. Supervision: Sukriti Issar.

Nubin Ciziri, Uppsala University (Department of Education). Visiting between January and June 2023. In her thesis, currently being written, she questions the transferability of family resources in the context of the migration of refugees in Sweden and studies their relationship to education according to contrasting resources.

Clemens Aeppli, Harvard University, visiting between September 1st - April 1st 2023 (Sciences Po / Harvard exchange programme). He is interested in how race and the organization of work intersect to form inequality in the United States. Supervision: Olivier Godechot. 

Kilian Winz, Université de Genève, Groupes Genevois d'analyse des politiques éducatives, Assistant, docteur en sciences de l'éducation. Invité du CRIS du 1er septembre au 1er décembre, sous la supervision de Agnès van Zanten. Rédaction d'un article comprenant une analyse comparative de la réforme des des lycées en France et dans un canton de Suisse Romande.

Nathalie Vigna, Université de Lausanne - ISS, visiting between September 1st and December 31th 2022, on the supervision of Carlo Barone. She is working on different aspects of social stratification, notably comparing objective and subjective measures, as well as geographical differences in several European countries.

Nathan Hoffman, doctorant en sociologie à UCLA, accueilli du 1er juin au 31 juillet 2022 sous la supervision de Mirna Safi. Il travaille sur la formation des migrants et la mobilité sociale intergénérationnelle. Il utilise notamment des données de l'enquête Trajectoires et Origines 2.

Jorunn Kaasa, doctorante à la Norwegian University for Science and Technology. Son sujet de thèse : immigration, intégration et mobilité soviale sur le marché du travail norvégien. Séjour du 7 mars au 31 mai 2022 sous la supervision de Mirna Safi.

Leonie Westhoff, doctorante à l'Université de Oxford, Department of Social Policy and Intervention. Accueillie de février à mars 2022, dans le cadre du programme d'échange Oxpo, sous la supervision de Emanuele Ferragina. Elle étudie les transformations du marché du travail sous l'angle des formes atypiques d'emploi (temporaire, auto-entrepreneuriat...) et leurs conséquences sur les revenus des travailleurs.

2019-2020

• Janina Beckmann, Université de Cologne, Institute of Sociology and Social Psychology, septembre - décembre 2019
• Jacob Garrett, Université de l'Utah (USA). Plusieurs séjours de 2019 à 2021
• Tabea Schroer, Leibniz Center for Science and Society (LCSS) à Hannovre, septembre 2019 - février 2020
• Amy Jones, Université du Wisconsin à Madison, septembre - décembre 2019 (LIEPP / OSC)

2018-2019

• Philippa Mullins, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), 1er avril - 30 juin 2019
• Thaíssa Bispo Souza, doctorante à l'IESP/UERJ (Institut d'Études Politiques et Sociales, Université de Rio de Janeiro) - septembre 2018 - janvier 2019
• Noa Achouche Sulzer, Tel Aviv University, 1er semestre universitaire 2018-2019