Maila Mertens has been a doctoral candidate at the chair of Prof. Dr. Rössel since 2022. She studied sociology and British and American literature and culture at the universities of Hamburg and Konstanz. There she worked as a research assistant in the areas of social structure analysis, quantitative methods and gender studies. Her research interests include inequality, especially gender inequality, as well as sociology of religion and quantitative methods.

As part of the interdisciplinary research priority program "Human Reproduction Reloaded," she examines the social implications of human reproduction.