Field of research: Gender Economics
Vardan Baghdasaryan
Vardan Baghdasaryan is an associate professor of Economics at the American University of Armenia. He holds PhD in Public Economics from Catholic University of Milan (Italy). His research interests are in public economics, policy evaluation, gender economics, and labor economics. Along with his academic research, Dr. Baghdasaryan is engaged in policy advisory with international organizations, such as ILO, UNDP, and the World Bank.
Olle Folke
Olle Folke is a Professor of Political Science at the Department of Government at Uppsala University, and currently a full-time researcher at SITE. His research focuses on political economics and gender & politics, with a particular emphasis on gender equality in the labor market and political representation. His work has been published in leading journals across economics, political science, sociology and business administration, and he has previously taught at Columbia University and Yale University.
(Last updated March 2026)
Perihan Saygin
Perihan is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Applied Economics at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Economics, IMT Lucca Institute for Advanced Studies, Italy, and she conducted her research for her PhD dissertation as a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. Before joining the UAB, she worked at the University of Mannheim, Germany, the World Bank, Washington, DC, and University of Florida, USA.
Mariam Lobjanidze
Mariam Lobjanidze joined ISET Policy Institute in September 2018, where she is currently a Lead Economist. She received her master’s degree in economics (Summa cum Laude) from ISET. She has been actively involved in conducting Regulatory Impact Assessments (RIA) since 2019. Since 2020, she has been actively working on elaborating gender impact assessments (GIA) methodology for Georgia, conducting GIAs, and delivering Gender Impact Assessment Trainings. Her research interests include Labor Markets, Gender Economics and Social Issues, Social Policy, Energy Security, and Climate Change.
Along with her research, she works as an invited lecturer at ISET, teaching Econometrics to second-year BA students.
[Last updated February 2026]
Anna Anisimova
Anna Anisimova obtained her PhD in Economics from Donetsk National University in 2010, with her doctoral thesis focused on Industrial Management. She then worked there as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Business Statistics and Economic Cybernetics. In June 2020, she joined SITE and currently holds the position of Researcher. Her main research interests are within gender economics, human capital development and transition economics.
(Last updated September 2025)
Cecilia Smitt Meyer
Cecilia Smitt Meyer holds a M.Sc. in Economics from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU), a B.Sc. in Economics and a B.Sc. in Political Science from the University of Gothenburg.
Cecilia worked as a full-time Research Assistant for the Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics (SITE) between 2022 and 2025. As of August 2025 she works as an analyst at the government offices. Cecilia’s research interests are mainly in gender, political and development economics.
(Last updated August 2025)
Mery Julakidze
Mery Julakidze is a Junior Researcher at ISET Policy Institute (ISET-PI). She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Economics from International School of Economics (ISET). Over the course of her studies and career, Mery has demonstrated a particular interest in gender economics, public policy, and development economics. In her BA thesis, she studied gender, ethnicity, and age pay gaps in the Georgian labor market.
[Last updated March 2022]
Knar Khachatryan
Knar Khachatryan is an associate professor at the College of Business and Economics at the American University of Armenia. She is an associate researcher at Center for European Research in Microfinance (CERMi), Belgium. Her research centers on financial inclusion, multidimensional poverty, gender and conflict studies. Her recent publications appear in Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance, Review of Development Economics, Eastern European Economics, Strategic Change and other journals. She holds a PhD in Management from SKEMA Business School (France) and a Doctorate in Economics from University of Cote d’Azur (France).
(Last updated September 2021)
Aleksandr Grigoryan
Aleksandr Grigoryan is an Associate Professor at the American University of Armenia and a CERGE-EI Foundation Teaching Fellow. Aleksandr Grigoryan has a PhD from the University of Turin and a Master’s Diploma from the Institute for Advanced Studies in Vienna, both in the economics field. Starting in 2009, he has worked at the Research Department in the Central Bank of Armenia and has been teaching at the American University of Armenia (AUA), School of Political Science and International Affairs.
Since April 2012, he has been appointed as an Assistant Professor of Economics at the College of Business and Economics and the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at the American University of Armenia. Dr. Grigoryan has served as the chair of the Master of Business Administration program, at the College of Business and Economics from 2014-2020. Aleksandr Grigoryan is very active in research and publishes in peer-reviewed journals regularly. He has publications in the Journal of Income Distribution and Eastern European Economics, among others.
His research covers topics from development economics such as income distribution, migration, transformation of industry structure.
(Last updated September 2022)
Artur Król
Artur Król joined CenEA as a Research Economist in February of 2020. He received his Bachelor’s degree in Finance and Accounting at the University of Szczecin in 2018 and Bachelor’s degree in Dietetics at the Pomeranian Medical University in 2019. He has specialized in microsimulation analysis of tax and benefit policies and has been analyzing labor market data with a special focus on gender inequality.
(Last updated October 2023)