Timo Van Canegem

Timo Van Canegem is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI), which he joined in October 2026. He is part of the Horizon Europe TRANSFER project, which examines the effectiveness of interventions aimed at reducing social inequalities in education and seeks to strengthen the connections between educational research, policy and practice. Timo is also Assistant Professor at the Multidisciplinary Institute for Teacher Education (MILO) at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), Belgium, where he teaches Sociology of Education and Educational Policies.

His research focuses broadly on educational inequality and the ways in which educational processes and institutional practices contribute to its reproduction. His work centres on three areas: the determinants and consequences of educational differentiation practices, such as grade retention and tracking, including their effects on students’ academic and non-academic outcomes; social and ethnic inequalities in education, with particular attention to biases in teachers’ expectations and recommendations; and the use of cross-national, mixed-methods and quasi-experimental research designs to study educational processes and inequalities.

Timo obtained his PhD in Sociology from Ghent University in 2022. His doctoral research examined the consequences of grade retention from a cross-national perspective. He subsequently received a Junior Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) to investigate how social inequalities may be reproduced through grade-retention decisions, including the role of implicit bias among teachers.