Mieke Van Houtte, PhD sociology, is full professor and head of the research team CuDOS (Cultural Diversity: Opportunities and Socialisation) at the Department of Sociology at Ghent University (Belgium). Her research interests cover diverse topics within the sociology of education, particularly the effects of structural and compositional school features on several diverse outcomes for students and teachers, with a focus on equal opportunities. In addition, she supervises research on sexual minorities. In both research lines, gender takes an important place.

She published in journals as Sociology of Education, American Educational Research Journal, Acta Sociologica, Sex Roles. Since her appointment as assistant professor in 2006 Van Houtte has been or is supervising more than 20 PhD-students, of whom 18 successfully defended their PhD in the meantime. She has been invited to keynote or lecture at several universities abroad, such as St.-Petersburg, Barcelona, Paris, Amsterdam and Lancaster (UK).

From 2009 until 2015 she was the president of the Flemish Sociological Association. And from 2017 until 2019 she coordinated the Research Network 10 (Sociology of Education) of the European Sociological Association (ESA). Since 2015 she is a member of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts.