Timur Ergen Appointed to Institute Labour and Economy in Bremen

After fifteen years as a researcher at the MPIfG, Timur Ergen is taking over as director of the Institute Labour and Economy (iaw) at the University of Bremen. In addition to managing the institute, in his new role he will also teach economic sociology and political economy at the University of Bremen. The iaw researches the effects of social change on working and living conditions, offering both basic and applied research as well as knowledge transfer and scientific consulting. Ergen began his academic career at the MPIfG as a doctoral student in 2010. After receiving his doctorate in 2014 from the University of Cologne with his dissertation on the “Political Economy of the Photovoltaic Industry,” he became a senior researcher in the Economic Sociology Research Area under Professor Jens Beckert. Ergen works on economic sociology, competition policy, and technological change, with a focus on industrial policy, deindustrialization, and state intervention in the economy. He gained international research experience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2012), Columbia University in New York (2019), and as a John F. Kennedy Memorial Fellow at Harvard University (2022/23), where he conducted comparative studies on deindustrialization in Germany and the US. Ergen’s move strengthens existing ties between the two institutions as he joins fellow MPIfG alumni already working at the Bremen institute.