Heini VÄISÄNEN

Principal investigator

Heini VÄISÄNEN is the principal investigator of the SOC-MISC project. She first studied sociology at the University of Helsinki (Finland) and then obtained a PhD in Demography from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE, United Kingdom) in 2016. With a particular interest in gender and feminist studies as well as statistics in addition to demography, she started her career by studying induced abortions. After finishing her PhD, she worked as a lecturer in the Department of Social Statistics and Demography at the University of Southampton (United Kingdom), and joined INED as a tenured researcher in 2020.

While working on abortion research, she noticed that there was a lack of studies on miscarriages in particular in social sciences and demography. She thus applied for an ERC Starting Grant in 2022 with the idea of studying the social inequalities associated with miscarriage (i.e. the SOC-MISC project). The study analyses and compares miscarriage data, their risk factors and health consequences in three countries: France, Finland and the United Kingdom. [HV1] 

This funding allows her to devote herself to a long-term project, which aims to produce results that could lead to policy changes regarding the care of people who have experienced miscarriages, and enhances the academic literature on the topic as well. 

Following this project, she would like to continue to conduct research on sexual and reproductive health. 

Find out more on : researcher webpage

Email : heini.vaisanen@ined.fr