Cornelia Kristen, Prof., Dr. rer. soc., has held the Chair of Sociology/Social Structure Analysis at Bamberg University since 2010. She was born in Pforzheim in 1972 and received her training in social sciences at the University of Mannheim and at Indiana University Bloomington (USA). After graduating in 1998 she joined the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES). In 2001, she earned a Marie Curie Fellowship of the European Union for a one-year research stay at the Interuniversity Center for Social Science Research and Methodology (ICS) in Groningen (Netherlands). Afterwards she completed her PhD in sociology at the University of Mannheim (2004). From 2004 to 2008, Cornelia Kristen held a research position at the University of Leipzig. Afterwards she came to the University of Göttingen where she headed, first as Junior Professor then as Associate Professor, a research group on “Ethnic Educational Inequality”, which had been established as part of the German Excellence Initiative. Her major research interests are in the fields of educational sociology, migration and integration of immigrants and ethnic minorities, and social inequality. She has published many articles in refereed journals and has been directing several national and international comparative projects on the processes of immigrants’ and their children’s structural assimilation. Within the NEPS she is in charge of pillar 4 “Education acquisition with migration background in the life course”.