Pearl Dykstra is professor of Empirical Sociology at Erasmus University Rotterdam. She is the Scientific Director of ODISSEI, the Open Data Infrastructure for Social Science and Economic Innovations in the Netherlands, which received Netherlands Roadmap for Large-scale Scientific Infrastructure funding in 2020.
In 2015 she was appointed as member of the group of European Commission Chief Scientific Advisors, and served as its Deputy Chair from 2016 to 2020. She currently holds the position of invited expert to the European Commission.
She is an elected member and previous Vice-President of the Netherlands Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), fellow of the Gerontological Society of America, and elected member of Academia Europaea. She served on the governing board of the International Science Council from 2018 to 2021.
She received an ERC Advanced Investigator Grant in 2012 for the research project “Families in context”, which focuses on the ways in which policy, economic, and cultural contexts structure interdependence in families.