Andre Salata is Professor of Sociology at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS), Brazil, where he teaches in the graduate programs in Sociology and Political Science, and Development Economics. He holds a Research Productivity Fellowship from the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) and is the founder and director of PUCRS Social Data, a research laboratory dedicated to the study of social inequalities, poverty, and labor market in Brazil (http://www.pucrs.br/datasocial). His research agenda focuses on social stratification and inequality, with particular emphasis on educational expansion, social mobility, and the reproduction of the middle class in Brazil, combining advanced quantitative methods with qualitative approaches. Over the last years he has published in journals such as the European Sociological Review (ESR), Research in Social Stratification and Mobility (RSSM), British Journal of Sociology of Education (BJSE), among many others.

Between December 2025 and July 2026, he will be a Visiting Professor at the Freie Universität Berlin, with  a CAPES–Humboldt Fellowship, hosted by Professor Sérgio Costa at the Latin American Institute. During his stay, he will develop the research project “Access and Permanence in the Brazilian Middle Class in a Context of Educational Expansion,” which investigates how large-scale educational expansion has reshaped opportunities for intergenerational mobility and class reproduction in Brazil. Drawing on survey data and multivariate models covering the last four decades, complemented by qualitative data, the project examines whether higher levels of education continue to secure access to and stability within middle-class positions, or whether educational credentials are increasingly subject to positional competition and inflation.

The research engages closely with Professor Costa’s theoretical contributions on entangled inequalities and inequality regimes in Latin America, contributing to international debates on education as a positional good and on the limits of educational expansion as a mechanism for reducing social inequality in contemporary societies. The fellowship from CAPES and Alexander von Humboldt Foundation aims to strengthen institutional cooperation between Brazilian and German research communities and to contribute to the internationalization of research in the social sciences.