Denisse Gelber

Denisse Gelber is a Phd. Candidate from the Sociology Department at UT-Austin, and has a BA in Sociology (Universidad Católica del Uruguay). Denisse has held the position of researcher in the Program "Integración, Pobreza y Exclusión Social" at Universidad Católica del Uruguay for the last six years. During that time she focused on inequality issues related to education, health, labor market and residential segregation's outcomes, always aiming at public policy recommendations.

For her BA thesis, she analyzed educational paths during Middle School in Uruguay to identify the configurations of risk and protective factors that lead to successful, unsuccessful (drop outs) and risky trajectories among low SES teenagers. Following this research line, her Master's thesis explored the relationship between friendship paths and educational paths for the same population, analyzing differences by gender. For her dissertation, she focuses on education's contribution to social mobility. She explores the impact of the investment in education, promoted by Conditional Cash Transfer policies, in youth labor market opportunities in Chile, Mexico and Uruguay.