Mar Cañizares 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 Deputy Director at the Directorate for Public Policy in the Presidency of the Government of Spain where I lead evidence-based policy analysis to support the design and implementation of priority government initiatives.

Before this, I worked as a Senior Policy Analyst at the National Office for Foresight and Strategy, where I co-led projects on the future of education, work, and demographic change to inform long-term strategies for more inclusive and sustainable societies — including HispanIA 2040, Spain’s first national AI foresight strategy, and the design and governance of Generaciones del Futuro, Spain’s first longitudinal cohort study, developed in partnership with CSIC and INE.

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 public policy initiatives. While I focus in particular on educational and labour market inequalities, I am also interested in how broader institutional arrangements—such as welfare systems or the digital world—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!