Senior Researcher and Head of the Socioeconomic Mobility Team
Socioeconomic mobility
Senior Researcher and Head of the Socioeconomic Mobility Team, Myers-JDC-Brookdale Institute; Researcher, Faculty of Management, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
Dr. Oren Heller is a Senior Researcher and Head of the Socioeconomic Mobility Team at the Myers-JDC-Brookdale Institute – Israel’s leading center for applied social research – and a researcher at the Faculty of Management at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.
He joined the Institute in 2025. His main areas of research include intergenerational social and economic mobility, equality of opportunity, poverty, and inequality.
In addition to his focus on social mobility, Dr. Heller specializes in socioeconomic policy and in the analysis of administrative data to understand social and economic mechanisms in Israel and to formulate data-driven policy recommendations.
Dr. Heller has extensive experience in leading socioeconomic research in both the public sector and international academia. Before joining the Institute, he led the Israeli research portfolio at the Social Policy Institute (SPI) at Washington University in St. Louis. Prior to that, he served as a Senior Economic Researcher at the National Insurance Institute of Israel, where he co-authored the annual Poverty and Social Gaps Report and other studies in the field.
Dr. Heller holds a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and economics, a master’s degree in economics, and a PhD in economics, all from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He also completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Social Policy Institute at Washington University in St. Louis.