Biographies
Professor van de Werfhorst
Herman van de Werfhorstis professor of sociology at the University of Amsterdam, and director of the Amsterdam Centre for Inequality Studies (AMCIS, He studies inequalities in and through education mostly in comparative perspective, both across societies and across time. His work has been published in various journals including the American Journal of Sociology, Sociology of Education, the British Educational Research Journal, the European Sociological Review, the British Journal of Sociology, Demography, and Comparative Education Review. He currently runs a large project on how and why educational systems affect inequalities in education, sponsored by a personal Vici Grant by the Netherlands’ Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), and is involved in the EU Horizon 2020 project ISOTIS. Formerly he was member of the coordination team of two large European networks, EQUALSOC (EU FP6 Network of Excellence) and GINI (EU FP7 Collaborative Research project). Van de Werfhorst was formerly working as Prize Research Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford University, and the Radboud University Nijmegen.
Daniel Salinas
Daniel Salinas is a researcher at the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which he joined in 2014. His research examines educational and social factors that affect student achievement and equity in achievement within and across countries. The main focus of Mr. Salinas’ research is socio-economically disadvantaged students and schools; he was the lead author of the PISA report, Low-Performing Students: Why They Fall Behind and How To Help Them Succeed, and is currently working on a forthcoming PISA report on educational equity and social mobility. Prior to joining the OECD, he conducted research on the consequences of educational expansion and privatization policies for social stratification in Latin America, and on the relationship between educational attainment and health. His work has been published in the Berkeley Education Review, Demography, Social Science and Medicine, among others. He holds a PhD from Pennsylvania State University, with a dual-title in Educational Theory & Policy and Comparative International Education. He also holds a Bachelor’s degree in Sociology and a Master’s in Literature from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Mr. Salinas was a visiting scholar at the Population Research Centre at the University of Texas at Austin, and was the recipient of a Fulbright fellowship.
Rodrigo Torres
Rodrigo Torres is a Thomas J. Alexander Fellow atOECD. He is currently finishing his PhD in Economics of Education at the UCL Institute of Education. He is also working as an External Consultant at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, in a research project on equity in education for the UNESCO Institute for Statistics. He is a Research Fellow at the College for Interdisciplinary Educational Research in Germany since 2016. His main research interests are educational inequality and education policy in primary and secondary education. Currently, his work focuses onthe determinants of educational inequality in Chile, the UK and other OECD countries. Before starting his PhD, he worked in Chile at the Ministry of Education as a Technical Advisor to the Minister of Education, and at the National Council of Education, mainly developing applied research on the Chileanhighereducation system. He holds a BSc in Engineering from the Catholic University of Chile.