Dr Sonja Avlijaš is Assistant Professor in Economic Policy and Development and CERGE-EI Foundation Career Integration Fellow (2024-2027). She holds a PhD from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), awarded in 2016. Dr Avlijaš was Associate Researcher at the Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Evaluation of Public Policies (LIEPP) at Sciences Po in Paris from October 2018 – November 2023, prior to which she was a post-doctoral researcher there (2016-2018). During 2022, she was the Wayne Vuchinich Fellow at Stanford University, California.

Between 2020-2022, Dr Avlijaš was a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow at the University of Belgrade’s Faculty of Economics, where she implemented the project titled “Southeast Europe’s emerging growth advocates: Domestic firms, technology and economic governance in institutionally weak states” – SEEGROW.

Dr Avlijaš has two main research interests: 1) innovation and development in the semi-periphery, including the role of small and medium enterprises as agents of innovation; and 2) growth and development in the Central Eastern and Southeastern European semi-periphery, focusing on the gender implications of these processes and their connections to welfare state reforms. She has also researched welfare states and growth regimes in Western democracies, as well as epistemological foundations of knowledge production on the semi-periphery. She frequently provides consulting expertise to the European Commission DG EMPL on social policy reforms and non-standard work. Prior to her academic career, she also worked at the Deputy Prime Minister’s Office of the Government of Serbia.