Congratulations to Domante Gerciene on the successful completion of her DPhil

Congratulations to Dr Domante Gerciene, who has been awarded her DPhil in Sociology.

Before starting her DPhil, Domante completed an MSc in Sociology at Oxford and received her BA in social sciences from Sciences Po Paris.

Domante's DPhil thesis ‘Antecedents of Educational Attainment: Parental Involvement, Genetics, and Non-Cognitive Skills’ was completed under the supervision of Melinda Mills and David Brazel. In her thesis, Domante integrated molecular genetic tools, in the form of educational attainment polygenic scores, to better understand the interplay of social and genetic endowments in producing educational disparities in the US. She used the Add Health and the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study to investigate the evocative relationship between children’s genetic predispositions and parental involvement, the role of education-based genetics in producing non-cognitive skills, and gender differences in the realisation of genetic potential over individual careers.

One of the most important goals of this thesis was to enrich the growing field of sociogenomics by paying special attention to the traditional sociological theory (such as gender and life-course perspectives) and by developing rich sets of measures for the constructs of interest (parental involvement, occupational attainment, and non-cognitive skills).

Domante hopes that her research will help to solidify the role of genetic mechanisms in the sociologists’ toolbox and in the broader sociological framework of attainment.

We wish Dr Gerciene every success in her future career and look forward to following her accomplishments!