Petra Sauer is LIS²ER Tony Atkinson research fellow at the Luxembourg Institute for Socio-economic Research (LISER) and the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS). She is also a fellow of the College for Interdisciplinary Educational Research (CIDER) and an affiliated scholar of the Individual in the Labour Market (ILM) Reading Group (Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge) as well as the Institute Economics of Inequality (INEQ, Vienna University of Economics and Business). She obtained her PhD in Economics from the Vienna University of Economics and Business in 2015.

In her research, Petra is concerned with the causes and consequences of social and economic inequalities which stem from unequal educational opportunities and labour market experiences across socio-economic groups. She is particularly interested in the inequality implications of higher education expansion in high-income countries, comparative political economy of higher education systems, and the transformation of work and employment. Her research has been published, among others, in the Review of Income and Wealth and the Journal of Economic Surveys. In 2018, she obtained the Kurt-Rotschild award for her effort to disseminate scientific findings to a broader public audience.