Miranda Lubbers is Full Professor (Catedrática) of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), and an ICREA Acadèmia fellow of the Catalan Institute of Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA). Her research examines how social networks shape key societal processes such as social cohesion, polarisation, and exclusion - particularly in the context of migration and socioeconomic vulnerability. While these processes are fundamentally relational, they have often been investigated at the individual level only. Lubbers’ work addresses this gap by placing social relations and networks at the center of analysis, using a combination of quantitative network methods and qualitative research.
At the UAB, she founded and directs the COALESCE Lab (Laboratory for Computational Analysis of Egonetworks, Social Cohesion, and Exclusion), which brings together interdisciplinary researchers who study these social processes from a network perspective. Her research leadership has been supported by major competitive grants, including an ERC Advanced Grant for the project "A network science approach to social cohesion in European societies" (PATCHWORK; European Research Council), and funding from the Volkswagen Foundation for the project "Inclusivity norms to counter polarization in European societies" (INCLUSIVITY; in consortium with Maarten van Zalk -lead PI-, Eva Jaspers, Oliver Christ, and Marcin Bukowski).
Prof. Lubbers received her PhD in Behavioral and Social Sciences from the University of Groningen in 2004. She has received, among other distinctions, a prestigious Ramón y Cajal senior research fellowship from the Spanish Ministry of Education, the 2010 Award of Excellence in Research from her university and in 2014 the Award for Outstanding Research Trajectory to the effects of the I3 Program of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation.
Her research has been published in leading journals such as Annual Review of Sociology, European Sociological Review, Social Networks, Human Nature, Sociological Methodology, International Migration Review, New Media and Society, the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, and the European Journal of Social Psychology.
Prof. Lubbers is Associate Editor of the journal Social Networks, and serves on the editorials of Social Inclusion and the Oxford University Press book series on social network mechanisms. She is an elected fellow of the European Academy of Sociology.
