Lara Altenstädter

Lara Altenstädter has been head of the Transfer department at the German Institute for Interdisciplinary Social Policy Research (DIFIS) since January 2025. Here, she is responsible for various event formats that serve to transfer knowledge in the context of social policy between politics, science, and practice. During her previous ten years at the University of Duisburg-Essen, she gained extensive expertise in research and teaching at the Institute for Social Work and Social Policy and the Institute for Sociology, and in 2022 she received her doctorate in sociology with a thesis on “The professional habitus of junior professors.” The study was published by Barbara Budrich Publishers under the title “Time Pressure, Adaptation, and Competition: A Photo Survey on the Professional Habitus of Junior Professors.” Lara Altenstädter has also been on the board of the Essen College for Gender Studies (EKfG) since 2020. From 2015 to 2018, she worked on the project “Equality-related action orientations and behaviors of female professors against the backdrop of equality policy regulations,” funded by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia. From 2021 to 2024, she worked as a research assistant in the BMBF-funded research and practice project “Discovering and communicating excellence. Raising awareness and developing expertise on the topic of excellence and gender for postdocs and actors in university communication (EXENKO)”. The project used dialogues between different groups of actors and workshop formats to build communication bridges and ultimately improve the visibility of female researchers in higher education and the public sphere.