Employees

Alexander Zahl-Thanem has a PhD in sociology from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim and has been employed at Ruralis since 2015. His research interests include social and spatial inequality in education, differences between urban and rural areas, as well as rural-specific issues related to mobility and immobility, housing preferences, public health, and youth in rural areas. He has specialised in quantitative methods and has contributed to a range of research projects involving the collection, preparation, and analysis of survey and register data. Currently, Zahl-Thanem is the project leader for the nationwide surveys “Trends in Norwegian Agriculture ” and the “Local Community Survey,” which target farmers and the general population in both rural and urban municipalities. He completed his PhD in 2025, in which he used register data to study social and spatial inequality in educational choices among youth and young adults in Norway.