Pearl Dykstra (1956) has a chair in Empirical Sociology and she is Director of Research of the Department of Public Administration and Sociology at the Erasmus University Rotterdam. Previously, she had a chair in Kinship Demography at Utrecht University and was a senior scientist at the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI) in The Hague. She has a BA in psychology from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, an MA in social psychology from the University of Toronto, and a PhD in social sciences from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her publications focus on intergenerational solidarity, aging societies, family change, aging and the life course, and loneliness. Large-scale projects for which she has been awarded grants include the Netherlands Kinship Panel Study (NKPS) and the EU 7th framework program MULTILINKS. International projects in which she is currently participating are “Life Course and Family Dynamics in a Comparative Perspective” (ORA-China collaboration), and “FamiliesAndSocieties” (EU 7th framework). She is consortium member of the Generations and Gender Programme (GGP), which is on the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research National Roadmap for Large-Scale Research Facilities. She is an elected member of the Netherlands Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW, 2004) and Vice-President of the KNAW as of 2011, elected Member of the Dutch Social Sciences Council (SWR, 2006), and elected fellow of the Gerontological Society of America (2010). In 2012 she received an ERC Advanced Investigator Grant for the research project “Families in context”, which will focus on the ways in which policy, economic, and cultural contexts structure intergenerational dependencies in families.