This grant is aimed at foreign researchers who wish to visit the LIVES Centre in Lausanne or Geneva for a period of at least two months and covers travel and/or accommodation expenses. Nine researchers will visit us in 2026.
The LIVES Centre offers several types of grants to support innovation in life course research. These funds are addressed to the members of the LIVES Centre as well as to the extended network of researchers studying the life course and vulnerability.
| UNIGE | |
Roxane de la Sablonnière, Ph.D. is a full professor in the Department of Psychology at the Université de Montréal. She is the director of the Social Change, Adaptation and Well-being Laboratory and co-founder of the InterCom Project. Her research focuses on the realities of people when they are exposed to dramatic social change such as COVID-19, colonization or immigration. The goal is to better understand social dynamics in a context of dramatic social change and to identify the most beneficial interventions for personal and collective well-being. In her work, she explores, among other things, multiple identities and intercultural relationships. She has surrounded herself with a multidisciplinary team to model adaptation to dramatic social change. She has worked with several groups that have been subjected to profound social change, notably in Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia and South Africa. |  |
| UNIL | |
Álvaro is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Economics Geography and Demography of the National Research Council (CSIC) in Madrid, Spain. His research interests focus on discrimination, social inequalities, and health. He obtained his PhD from the Department of Sociology: Methodology and Theory, at Universidad Complutense of Madrid. |  |
Costanzo Ranci is Full Professor of Economic Sociology at the Polytechnic of Milan, where he also chairs the Social Policy Lab. He has published several books and scientific articles on topics such as welfare, social vulnerability, and social care policies. He was visiting scholar at the University of California – Berkeley, the University Autonoma of Barcelona, the University of Lausanne, Harvard University, Oxford University. His current research focuses on the following topics: middle-class insecurity, social investment policies, social care policies, school segregation and inequalities. |  |
Franco Bonomi Bezzo conducts research at the crossroads of sociology, economics, and political science. He obtained his PhD in 2020 from ISER at the University of Essex, and since April 2021 he has been a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Milan within the ERC project DESPO. Since 2020, he has lived in Paris and has been affiliated with INED (2020–2025) and, since 2025, with LEST at the University of Aix-Marseille. Franco’s research focuses on how individual attitudes, primarily those related to paid work and socio-political inequalities, are formed and evolve in the context of crises and transformations. Specifically, he approaches these themes investigating how the socio-economic and cultural contexts in which people are embedded throughout their lives shape individual outcomes. |  |
Dr Liam O’Farrell is a researcher working on inequality and development. He has worked across twelve countries, ranging from civic engagement in Iceland and participatory planning in Greece to regional policy in Japan and housing policy in France. His PhD is from the University of Sheffield, where he was jointly supervised in urban studies and political economy on a collaborative studentship with the Tax Justice Network. His project, ‘Luxury State Capture and the Elite City’, was carried out in Geneva, Luxembourg and Monaco. Liam has a particular interest in spatial justice and has published in several leading urban studies journals. |  |
Marc Scott is a Professor of Applied Statistics who specializes in statistical methods for longitudinal data. He has made substantial scientific contributions to economics, sociology, psychology, education and health. He has led or served as Co-Investigator on studies of low-wage labor markets, pulmonary disease, educational attainment, and health, especially in under-resourced families. Methodological development has been in the areas of longitudinal data analysis (continuous and non-continuous outcomes, event histories), multilevel modeling, model-based clustering, and sequence analysis. He also has contributed to the field of causal inference, particularly in the area of sensitivity analysis. At his home institution (New York University), he teaches courses in statistical computing, multilevel models, generalized linear mixed models, and machine learning. He would be happy to meet with students and faculty to discuss methodological aspects of their research, particularly if it is in one of these areas of his expertise. |  |
Maria Vaalavuo is chief researcher at the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare. Maria gained her PhD in Social and Political Sciences at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, in 2011. She currently leads the SustAgeable consortium (Economic and social sustainability across time and space in an ageing society) funded by the Strategic Research Council. Her research interests cover social and economic inequalities, social sustainability, intergenerational transmission of disadvantage, poverty dynamics, and mental health. Maria often works in the intersection of sociology, social policy, and economics, and welcomes interdisciplinary collaboration. Her research has been published in European Sociological Review, Journal of European Social Policy, Journal of Migration and Health, and Journal of Population Economics, among others. For a full list of publications and projects, visit her website. |  |
Mengxuan (Suri) Li is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Social Science Research at the University of Queensland and the Centre of Excellence for Children and Families over the Life Course. She works on the Bringing Equality Home project, with research focusing on gender inequality, family dynamics and life-course processes using longitudinal and administrative data. She holds a DPhil in Sociology from Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. Her PhD thesis explored the relationship between household resources and child wellbeing in Ireland, Australia, and the UK. |  |
GrI am a PhD candidate in Psychology at Beijing Normal University, China. My research focuses on the psychological and behavioral consequences of economic inequality, such as sleep quality, emotions, and work hours. During my visit to the LIVES Centre, I will collaborate with Dr. Nicolas Sommet, using longitudinal data to examine how inequality relates to individual life trajectories. |  |