Biography
Anton Hemerijck, Professor of Political Science and Sociology at the Department of Political and Social Sciences.
Trained as an economist at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, he took his doctorate from Oxford University. In his capacity of Dean of the Faculty of the Social Sciences at the Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam, together with Jonathan Zeitlin, he founded with the University of Amsterdam, the Amsterdam Centre for Contemporary European Studies (ACCESS EUROPE). He also directed the Scientific Council for Government Policy (WRR), the principle think tank in the Netherlands, while holding a professorship in Comparative European Social Policy at the Erasmus University Rotterdam. Between 1996 and 2000 he was senior researcher at the Max-Planck-Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne. In addition, he has held numerous visiting appointments, ranging from MIT to the University of Lisbon, the University of Antwerp, the Collegio Carlo Alberto of Turin University. Between 2014 and 2017, Anton Hemerijck was Centennial Professor of Social Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). At the EUI, together with his colleague Philipp Genschel he fielded EUI-YouGov Solidarity in Europe Survey, which has been running since 2018.
Over the past decade he frequently served as an advisor on social policy, social investment and the welfare state for the European Commission. In 2020, he received an ERC Advanced Grant for his research project Wellbeing Returns on Social Investment Recalibration (WellSIRe – Grant Number A 882276). Between 2021 and 2023, he was a member of the European Commission High-Level Group on the Future of Social Protection and of the Welfare State in October 2021, chaired by Former European Commissioner Anna Diamantoupolou. He is a member of Academea Europea.
Key publications include Changing Welfare States (2013) and The Uses of Social Investment (2017), and Who’s Afraid of the Welfare State Now? (2024), and published with Oxford University Press.