Biography

A sociologist and an applied statistician, Flavien Ganter is a Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Social and Political Sciences, supported by the Kohli Foundation for Sociology. He received a Ph.D. in Sociology from Columbia University in 2025, and graduated from the École normale supérieure Paris–Saclay and the École nationale de la statistique et de l’administration économique (ENSAE).


Flavien’s research lies at the intersection of race and ethnicity, international migration, social stratification, and cultural sociology. He is broadly interested in the relationship between cognitive processes of classification and macro-level patterns of inequality and segregation. His methodological research focuses on developing and refining tools in statistical modelling, computational methods, and experimental design.


In his dissertation, Flavien develops an original methodology to explore how people think about their own society—how they see it structured and patterned—and proposes a systematic topography of the U.S. social space as perceived by Americans. As a Max Weber Fellow, he plans to examine how social cleavages that cut across ethnoracial categories reshape ethnoracial boundaries in the United States, and to study the long-term residential trajectories of immigrants and their children in France.

Mentor

• Valentina, Di Stasio

Fields of expertise