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Maria Brandén is a Professor and Head of Division at Linköping University, affiliated with the Department of Management and Engineering (IEI) and the Institute for Analytical Sociology (IAS). She has been part of IAS since its founding in 2014 and became its director in January 2021. Her primary role involves leading research and fostering interdisciplinary collaborations, particularly in computational social science. She is based at Campus Norrköping and can be reached at maria.branden@liu.se.
Education: Maria Brandén holds a PhD in Sociological Demography from Stockholm University (2014), which focused on couple decisions related to residential mobility. She has since expanded her research into broader societal issues.
Research Interests: Her work examines how segregation (school, housing, workplace) impacts individuals’ life chances, leveraging Sweden’s extensive register data. Key areas include neighborhood effects, socio-economic inequalities in health outcomes (e.g., during the pandemic), and computational methods such as machine learning to analyze complex social dynamics. She emphasizes understanding heterogeneous effects and long-term societal impacts of segregation.
Grants & Projects: As Principal Investigator (PI), she secured SEK 13 million from the Swedish Research Council (2020–2023) to combine machine learning with register data for studying social inequality. Additional projects funded by Forte and the Swedish Research Council address school and housing segregation. She also leads the Institute’s strategic growth and international collaborations.
Labs/Teams: Director of IAS, which focuses on agent-based simulations, social network analysis, and text mining. She co-founded the SweCSS (Swedish Centre for Computational Social Science) and oversees its Visiting Fellows Program to bridge social and computational sciences.
