NEWS Anna Baranowska-Rataj, postdoc at the Department of Sociology, was recently nominated as one of the winners of a prize awarded by the Foundation of the weekly magazine Polityka for the best young scientists. The Foundation distinguishes researchers in 5 disciplines, Anna was distinguished in the category of social sciences.
- Of course I'm very happy about that. This prize is considered as very prestigious in Poland, but it has also a goal related promoting research. The Foundation which awards this prize aims to show that researchers are ordinary human beings, who, apart from doing their job decently, have their own interests and passions. I really like the idea behind this prize because it decreases the distance between the world of academia and the society.Anna comes from Warsaw, Poland, where she works at Warsaw School of Economics as an assistant professor. She took a sabbatical leave and came to Umeå in March 2013 in order to join the multidisciplinary team involved in the Umeå SIMSAM Lab project.- My research interests cover the impact of family size on well-being of family members, among others. I wanted to examine how growing up in a large family affects child health and education chances. Umeå SIMSAM Lab provides data that are simply perfect for the study that I wanted to carry out.Anna is also part of the research project "How important is the number of siblings of children's health?". The project has received research funding from FORTE and will be carried out at the Department of Sociology by Karina Nilsson and Anna, Xavier de Luna from Umeå School of Business and Economics and Anneli Ivarsson from Department of Public Health and Clinical Medicine.- This project will let us carry on research that we started when I came here. Analysing register data, that include large samples of millions of observations, takes a lot of time, so it's great that we have the funding to continue our work. Besides, this funding gives us an opportunity to develop the ideas of longitudinal research on health trajectories of children across families’ structures that emerged in the team that I've been working with in the Umeå SIMSAM Lab.
Umeå SIMSAM LabWatch the Polish video interview with Anna Baranowska-Rataj