Michaela Kreyenfeld

Michaela Kreyenfeld is Professor of Sociology at the Hertie School in Berlin and Co-Director of the Einstein Center Population Diversity. She holds significant institutional affiliations including membership in the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, executive board membership in the German Society of Demography, and advisory roles at the Federal Institute for Population Research (BiB) and Institute for Employment Research (IAB).

Her research focuses on the intersection of social inequality, social policy, and family sociology/demography, with a methodological emphasis on longitudinal life course analysis. She examines family formation patterns, demographic transitions, and the impacts of social policies on family dynamics across Europe, particularly investigating how life events like divorce and childbirth affect long-term outcomes in health, employment, and pension entitlements.

Her recent publications reveal a strong focus on European family dynamics, with particular attention to childlessness, post-divorce parental trajectories, and policy impacts on family structures. Her work increasingly integrates health outcomes with demographic transitions, using innovative register data methodologies to examine causal relationships between family events and long-term socioeconomic consequences.

Professor Kreyenfeld chairs important policy advisory bodies including the Expert Commission for the German Federal Government's 10th Family Report and serves on the Scientific Advisory Board for Family Issues of the German Federal Ministry. Her current research projects include the DFG-funded Divorce and Diagnosis (DiDi) project examining health impacts of divorce, and the FAMPEN project comparing pension entitlements after family events in France and Germany.

She teaches courses including Applied Longitudinal Data Analysis, Social Inequality, and Demographic Change & Policy Challenges at the Hertie School, where she has been faculty since 2014.