At the ECSR Annual Conference, held at Trinity College Dublin from 15-17 June 2026, the winners of the ECSR Prize for the Best PhD Thesis of the Year were officially announced.
The 1st prize was awarded to Gaia Ghirardi (European University Institute, Florence) for her thesis “Interaction of Family Socioeconomic Status and Genotype in the Intergenerational Transmission of Educational and Health Inequalities”.
The 2nd prize was awarded to Vanessa Wittemann (University of Cologne) for the thesis titled “Reframing Reproduction: A Prospective Approach to the Intergenerational Transmission of Educational Attainment and Political Orientation” and 3rd prize to Kerstin Ostermann (Institute for Employment Research (IAB), Nuremberg) for her thesis “Spatial Inequality and Social Outcomes Using Georeferenced Data to Explain the Spatial Dimension of Networks, Social Norms, and Context Effects.”
The winner of the first prize received a cash award of €500, while the runners-up received €300 and €200 respectively.
This year, 17 institutions submitted a candidate for the best PhD prize. Members of the ECSR Board shortlisted 3 candidates based on extended abstracts. An expert panel, consisting of Prof. Wiebke Schulz (Universität Bremen, Socium), Prof. Dimitris Pavlopoulos (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) and Prof. Anna Baranowska-Rataj (ECSR board & Umeå University) read the shortlisted PhDs and chose the winners.
All awarded theses are recognized for their significant contributions to sociological research and to advancing the life course perspective in comparative research.
The call for nominations for theses defended in 2026 will be announced in February 2027.