Mar C. Espadafor

I am a quantitative sociologist and policy analyst from Almería (Spain), one of the sunniest cities in Europe. I work at the intersection of inequality research and strategic foresight. Currently, I serve as a Senior Policy Analyst at the National Office for Foresight and Strategy in the Presidency of the Government of Spain. There, I coordinate projects on the future of education, work, and demographic change, utilising research to inform long-term strategies that promote more inclusive and sustainable societies. You can check the work of the Office here.

Before joining the public sector, I completed a PhD in Social and Political Science at the European University Institute (EUI), where I specialised in social stratification and causal inference methods. I have held positions as a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Horizon Europe project MapIneq, as an INVEST Fellow at the University of Turku, and as a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Demography and Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

At the core of my professional and research agenda is a simple but urgent question: How can we reduce inequality through research and policy? I try to answer this question by combining rigorous empirical work with hands-on policy engagement. While I focus in particular on educational and labour market inequalities, I am also interested in how broader institutional arrangements—such as welfare systems, state-building, or reproductive rights—shape inequality across generations. My work has been published in journals like European Sociological Review, Population & Environment, or PLOS One, and I regularly teach causal inference in international methods schools such as RECSM at UPF and TNSQUARE in Trento.

If you work on similar topics or if you’re curious about what strategic foresight looks like from inside government, feel free to get in touch!