Before joining the Department of Sociology and Human Geography at the University of Oslo, Synøve N. Andersen worked as a researcher at the Unit for Social and Demographic Research at Statistics Norway and as a part-time Associate Professor of Empirical Legal Studies at the Department of Criminology and Sociology of Law. She is also affiliated with the Department of Criminology and Justice Studies at Drexel University, Philadelphia, US. Synøve holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Oslo, and her work has focused primarily on quasi-experimental analyses of Norwegian correctional and family policies, comparative criminal justice and the dynamics of co-offending networks and criminal careers. For her postdoc with PROMENTA, Synøve will both deepen and expand upon her work in these subject areas, exploring the impact of criminal justice contacts on crime, drug use and employment trajectories, and combining network and spatial analyses to assess the social and spatial properties of illicit networks. She also plans to conduct a field experiment that explores issues related to the forthcoming Drug Policy Reform in Norway.
Vidar Ulset finished his Cand. Psychol. at the University of Oslo in 2012. He defended his PhD thesis in June 2020, which examined social and natural environmental predictors of healthy development in the context of daycare and early childhood. Before starting on his PhD, Vidar worked as a primary care psychologist and holds a specialization in clinical community psychology. For his postdoc with PROMENTA, Vidar will to work with large scale longitudinal studies that combines survey, register and molecular genetic data with emphasis on the development of mental health problems in transition from adolescence to early adulthood. In particular, he will focus on social gradients and how they differ across various health problems, the interplay between social and genetic factors, and how social gradients change with changing social contexts. Vidar works in the Psychosocial Determinants research group.
Espen Moen Eilertsen works in the Neighborhood Genetics research group at PROMENTA. He is a graduate of the Department of Psychology at the University of Oslo and completed his PhD at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health in 2018, on the topic intergenerational transmission of common mental disorders. During his postdoc position at PROMENTA, he will continue studying how mental disorders are transferred across generations within families. Espen will focus on genetically informative study designs in order to distinguish alternative processes of intergenerational transmission.