Steffen Mau is Director and Head of the Department of Inequality, Transformation, and Conflict at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity (MPI-MMG). He is also S-Professor of Macrosociology at Humboldt University in Berlin.
Steffen Mau studied sociology and political science at the Free University of Berlin from 1991 to 1997. From 1998 to 2001, he was the first East German doctoral candidate to earn a doctorate at the European University Institute in Florence on the topic of the welfare state. This was followed by positions at Humboldt University in Berlin and the University of Bremen, where he was appointed junior professor in 2003 and professor of political sociology in 2005.