Christian Imdorf - Biography#

I graduated from the Swiss University of Fribourg with a major in social work and a minor in special education in the year 2000. I received my Ph.D. in educational sciences at the Universities of Fribourg in 2005 with precious support from the Interdisciplinary Centre for Gender Studies’s doctorate program at the University of Bern. My dissertation thesis focused on school qualifications, national origin, gender and the transition to vocational education and training in Switzerland.

From 2006 to 2009, I conducted postdoctoral studies on employer discrimination in the hiring of apprentices, supported by a fellowship for advanced researchers from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). I have conducted this research at the Goethe University Frankfurt, the Institute of Labour Economics and Industrial Sociology (LEST) in Aix-en-Provence, and the University of Glasgow. The research later resulted in my Habilitation.

I held SNSF Research Professorships in Sociology at the University of Basel from 2011 to 2015 and at the University of Bern from 2025 to 2017. This SNSF career funding facilitated my research programme on educational systems and gendered school-to-work transitions.

I received my postdoctoral lecturing qualification in sociology (habilitation) from the University of Basel in 2016, and the French qualification for University Professorships in Sociology and Education (Agrégation) in 2018.

Prior to joining Leibniz University Hannover as a full professor of sociology of education in 2019, I worked as an associate professor of sociology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim in 2018, where I taught social theory in the department of sociology and political science.

Since 2025 I am the ProSkills2Work ERA-Chair Holder at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences in Sofia, Bulgaria.

I served as a board member of the Swiss Sociological Association from 2013 to 2017, as speaker of the German Sociology Association's Section of Sociology of Education from 2020 to 2024, and as research ombudsperson at the German Centre for Higher Education Research and Science Studies (DZHW) from 2020 to 2023.