Eva-Maria Merz is a sociologist with a background in family studies and demography. She heads the research line Donor Behaviour at Sanquin and is Full Professor in Donor Behaviour at the Sociology department of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Merz obtained a master’s degree in social sciences from the Freie Universität Berlin (2003) and a PhD in Developmental Psychology from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (2008). From 2008 to 2014, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher and later as a senior researcher at the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences. In 2018, she received a prestigious European Research Council (ERC) grant to study motivators and barriers of (blood) donor behavior over time and across different cultural and societal contexts. Merz’s research benefits from her fruitful collaborations within the Dutch Blood Bank, and international organizations such as International Society of Blood Transfusion (ISBT) or the National Health Service Blood and Transplant, and the German, Finnish, Belgian, Australian and Austrian Red Cross.  

Eva-Maria Merz combines her theoretical and applied expertise in blood and organ donor behavior to study donor life-courses and the influence of personal and social network characteristics in different contexts. Her passion for this subject stems from her scholarly engagement with different types of prosocial behavior, for example family care, and her interest in public health issues. She applies theoretical and empirical insights from the social sciences to dilemmas in transfusion and transplantation medicine, i.e., the high-cost behavior of donating substances of human origin and the availability of adequate and suitable products for different patient groups. In all her projects, she uses a dynamic life-course perspective to unravel how the interplay between individual agency, relationships within social networks across life stages, and the socio-cultural context affect blood, cell and organ donation. 

Transplant organs remain in short supply around the world. Many patients die each year due to long waiting lists and organ shortages. One proposed policy solution to increase organ availability is to change the registration default for posthumous organ donors from an opt-in system (the default is to be a non-donor and actively register) to an opt-out system (the default is to be a donor and actively deregister) system. However, organs for transplantation are donated by both posthumous and living donors: family, friends, or strangers. Epidemiological evidence shows that the number of living donors decreases under an opt-out standard compared to an opt-in system. Differences in legislation (e.g., opt-in in Germany and opt-out in Austria), as well as recent changes in legislation from opt-in to opt-out, for example in Wales and the Netherlands, provide an excellent opportunity and impetus to study the mechanisms underlying individual and policy decision-making regarding post-mortem and living organ donation. In her work, Professor Merz examines ethical and moral issues surrounding organ donation and transplantation, the availability and accessibility of transplants for patient care, and policies that seek to influence decisions about organ donation and transplantation. 

Merz’s tandem partner is Michel Clement, Professor of Marketing and Media at the University of Hamburg. 

Her HIAS Fellowship is provided by the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg and the federal and state funds acquired by Universität Hamburg in the framework of its Excellence Strategy.