Ruben Schalk is postdoc researcher at Utrecht University. His dissertation examined the match between education and training institutions and labour markets in the Netherlands between 1750 and 1920. His main research interest concerns the effect of institutional changes on educational opportunities and career paths, during the early modern and modern period. Other fields of interest are apprenticeship training, guilds, financial history, business history and urban history.

For CLARIAH Ruben worked at the Structured Data Hub. As part of the large-scale CLARIAH project, the Structured Data Hub aims to connect and provide access to structured datasets containing socio-economic and demographic data. The project will also enable the visualisation and analysis of these data, in order to help find answers to important questions about inequality in the world and about historical demography.