I have both German and French citizenship - but grew up in Germany (Northeim, Lower Saxony) where I also completed my upper secondary education (Abitur) at the Corvinanum Northeim. Northeim, by the way, is the town studied in the famous micro-history book by William Sheridan Allen The Nazi Seizure of Power - something I did not know until an American history professor enlightened me sometime in the early 2000s - even though I took the advanced history ("Leistungskurs") at my gymnasium. I subsequently studied social sciences (Diplom Sozialwissenschaften) at the University of Mannheim (1996-2002) with a one year stint as an exchange student at Indiana University's Department of Sociology (1999-2000). I finished my MA (Diplom) degree in 2002 and worked as a "wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter" for Professors Walter Müller and Josef Brüderl at the University of Mannheim's Faculty of Social Sciences and the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES). For a number of years I was the coordinator of the exchange program between Indiana University and the University of Mannheim. Together with Walter Müller I also wrote the research grant proposal for the project Social Selectivity in Tertiary Education and Labour Market and Stratification Outcomes which received funding from the German Science Foundation (DFG). I wrote my PhD thesis in that project and a number of other researchers (Carlo Barone, Markus Klein, Martin Neugebauer, Steffen Schindler) also held positions in that project at least for some time. I finished my PhD 2009 and moved to Denmark in the same year following my (Icelandic) wife Rósa who secured a position at the East European Studies program at Aarhus University. My own career at AU started in May 2009 with a postdoc at the Danish School of Education (DPU) and after securing a tenured position in 2013, I was promoted to professor (with special responsibilities) in 2015. In 2023 it was time to move again - and now I hold the position as professor of sociology of education at the University of Iceland. The position is a marriage between the School of Education and the School of Education - as I am employed with 50% at both Schools. Since starting in Iceland I also was awarded a European Research Council Consolidator Grant for the EDUCHANGE project. The project builds on my previous work by developping and implementing field experiments in four countries (DE, DK, HU, IS) with the goald to reduce inequality at key educational transitions.