Sanda Üllen brings over 15 years of expertise in migration studies, with a strong focus on areas such as migration and integration, return migration, transnationalism, and social cohesion. Before joining ICMPD’s research unit in 2023 she contributed to various projects at ICMPD, focusing on family migration, integration, and return migration to the Western Balkans. Since joining Sanda has continued to build on her work in migration and social cohesion. Alongside her role at ICMPD, she serves as a lecturer at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna, where she teaches courses on qualitative research methods, urban anthropology, and memory studies.
Her previous professional experience also includes work at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, where she conducted ethnographic fieldwork and co-authored publications on the visibility of the Romani minority in Austria. Sanda holds a PhD from the University of Vienna, where she completed her dissertation in 2017 on the topic of “Remembering Home? Transnational Families and the Ambivalences of Memory in the Post-War Context of Bosnia and Herzegovina.” She is fluent in German, English, and Bosnian/Serbian/Croatian, and has a good command of French, Italian, and Spanish.
