Prof. Dr. Marlis Buchmann born in 1950, was appointed to the University of Zurich in 1994. Until 2005 she also held a professorship at the ETH. Since 2004 she has been executive director of the Jacobs Center for Productive Youth Development at the University of Zurich. She has also held positions as Visiting Professor at Stanford University, UCLA, NYU, The New School for Social Research, the University of Bremen, the WZB, and twice as a fellow at CASBS, Stanford. Her main areas of research are: life course, social stratification and mobility, sociology of education, occupation and labour markets, social and cultural change. She is a member of the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina.