Research Grants for Isabel Raabe and Valentina Petrović
Two researchers from the Department of Sociology at the University of Zurich have recently secured research grants. Dr. Isabel Raabe has been awarded an ERC Starting Grant, while Dr. Valentina Petrović has received an SNSF Ambizione Grant. Both stipends are to support early career science researchers in their research endeavors.
Isabel Raabe has been awarded a competitive ERC Starting Grant for her project «BOOST: Blending Online and Offline Social Ties». BOOST investigates how online interactions and offline relationships combine into integrated socialisation systems during adolescence and how these shape educational inequalities. The project will collect longitudinal, multi-layered social network data from an entire school district, capturing relationships among classmates, out-of-school friends, online-only contacts, and family members. Using these unique data, BOOST will examine topics such as how digital communication shapes family cohesion across households and generations, and whether online peer networks create new educational opportunities for disadvantaged adolescents or reinforce existing inequalities.
Isabel will take the ERC grant to the University of Münster, where she will join the Department of Sociology as an Assistant Professor for Education and Socialisation from October 2026.
Valentina Petrović has been awarded an SNSF Ambizione Grant, a funding scheme designed to support outstanding early-career researchers in establishing their scientific independence and developing their own research agenda. She will research how exchanges of jobs and services for political loyalty shape cleavages and the way people vote. Her research explores this question in Bulgaria, Hungary, North Macedonia and Serbia in the project Perceptions of Party-Voter Linkages: How Clientelism shapes Political Cleavages in Eastern Europe, starting next fall at the Department of Political Science at the UZH.
We congratulate Isabel and Valentina and wish them every success in their future projects.
