Berkay Özcan
Professor of Social Research and Public Policy
Affiliation: NYU Abu Dhabi
Education: PhD Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona, Spain), MSc Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona, Spain)
Research Areas: Social policy, demography, population economics
Berkay Özcan is a Professor of Social Research and Public Policy. He has also been a Professor of Social and Public Policy and Co-Director of the Women in Social and Public Policy Research Hub (WiSPPRH) at the London School of Economics. Prior to joining LSE in 2011, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Yale University. He held visiting researcher positions at Princeton University (2006); at the Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER) of Essex University (2007); at the Nuffield College of the University of Oxford (2015); and at the University College London (2017; and 2023). He is an external Research Fellow at the Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration (CReAM) of the Economics Department at the UCL. He received his PhD in Political and Social Sciences from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona) in 2008 after completing his MSc in Economics from the University.
Özcan is a social demographer working at the intersection between family processes (i.e., divorce, marriage, and fertility) child outcomes, and families’ economic outcomes. His work is interdisciplinary, cutting across research in demography, family sociology, and economics, and pays specific attention to policies, laws, and regulations. His published research can be found in internationally prominent journals of all three disciplines, such as Annual Review of Sociology, Proceedings of National Academy of Science (PNAS), Journal of Human Resources, Demography, European Economic Review, among many others. His published work has received considerable media attention and covered frequently in newspapers such as The New York Times, Daily Telegraph, and Daily Mail, and websites such as The Huffington Post, etc. He has given many radio and TV interviews, including BBC, CTv (Canadia), ITv (London), Irish Radio, etc.
Özcan is an elected board member of RC28 Social Stratification, and currently serves on the editorial board of Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, the official journal of RC28. He has been an Advisory Board member of the ESRC Research Centre on Micro-Social Change (MiSOC) at Essex University. He has worked as a policy consultant to the International Office of Migration (IOM) of the UN, the European Investment Bank, Public Health England, and the Ministry of Justice, UK.