Team

Dr.Mirre Stallen
An assistant Professor at Leiden University, where she leads the Social Inequality Lab, and also holds a position as Senior Researcher at the Poverty Interventions group of the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. These two roles are mutually reinforcing: our academic insights inform the development of real-world poverty interventions, while questions from the field shape the research agenda of her lab. After completing her PhD at Erasmus University Rotterdam, she held a postdoctoral position at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour at Radboud University Nijmegen. A subsequent move to Stanford University led to a research fellowship in the Department of Psychology before returning to the Netherlands.

Zafira Shabrina
She is a PhD candidate in Economic Psychology at Leiden University, supervised by Prof. Wilco van Dijk, Prof. Lotte van Dillen, and Dr. Mirre Stallen. Her research focuses on decision-making in financially vulnerable populations or those at risk of vulnerability through suboptimal decisions by exploring how people navigate uncertainty across two timescales: how psychological factors hinder self-employed workers from planning for retirement (long-term), and how income volatility shapes psychological states and saving decisions (short-term). Beyond her PhD, she is passionate about poverty research, particularly how hidden inequalities compound poverty. Besides her research work, she holds a position as a lecturer at Universitas Gadjah Mada, Indonesia.

Halima Bouras
Halima Bouras is a PhD student at Leiden University, within Social, Economic, and Organisational Psychology and worked as a lecturer for 23 years, at a university of applied sciences. She holds a master in psychology and two bachelors (B. of Education in general economics and marketing management).
She is recipient of a doctoral grant for teachers of the Dutch Research council (NWO).

Research interests:
Education inequality of opportunity and social inequality in general.

Anya Benson
A bachelor’s student in psychology, specialising in social and economic psychology, and will soon begin a master’s degree in this field. She joined the team to explore the interplay between psychological processes and economic decision making in real-world contexts. Her aim is to build on research skills, and to contribute to projects to gain experience translating theoretical knowledge into practice.

“I aspire to carry these skills forward into a future career in psychological research of inequality and its effects on human behaviour.”

Research interests: Behavioral Economics, Social Behavior, Trust, and Health

Mikołaj Antczak
A bachelor’s student in psychology, specialising in organizational, social, and consumer and economic psychology. His resaerch work so far has focused primarily on the topics of SES, trust and the observed behavioural interactions between them.

Research Insterests: Trust, Socioeconomic Status, Decision-Making, Biases & Heuristics

Alessandro van den Berg
A Research Assistant at the Social Inequality Lab, Leiden University and a lecturer at the department of Cognitive Psychology.

In collaboration with Dr. Mirre Stallen at Leiden University, he investigates the relationship between poverty and well-being. In doing so, he combines neuroendocrinological markers with cognitive behavioral tasks. His research focuses in particular on cortisol in human hair as an indicator of chronic stress. Within this research framework, he is especially interested in the intersection of poverty and inequality, and cognition. In addition, his work contributes to methodological transparency in psychological science by examining how motivating factors underlying research participation are reported.

Research Interests:
Health Inequality, Merit, and Social Mobility.