Mareike zum Felde is a scientific employee and PhD candidate in the joint project Mod-Block-DDR, and her dissertation deals with the development lines of higher education policy in Poland since the beginning of the transformation. In contrast to the economy, there was no radical restructuring of universities and scientific institutions after 1990, but rather gradual reforms. Mareike zum Felde empirically analyses the factors influencing the changes in higher education policy. In doing so, she closes an important gap in the literature - also with regard to the connection between higher education policy and the emergence of an innovation-oriented, knowledge-based economy.

Mareike zum Felde's dissertation is part of work package 7 of the joint project Mod-Block-DDR, which deals with the strategies and actors of transformation and is led by Prof. Dr. Heiko Pleines (Research Centre Eastern Europe).

BIGSSS is an international graduate school jointly run by the University of Bremen and Jacobs University in Bremen. It is one of the leading international graduate schools in the field of empirical social science research in Germany. Jutta Günther, Heiko Pleines and Michael Rochlitz are faculty members of the BIGSSS.