Maiken Pontoppidan

Areas of work

Maiken Pontoppidan is a senior researcher at VIVE – The Danish Center for Social Science Research. Her work focuses on the development and evaluation of interventions targeting children, youth, and families in vulnerable situations. She has a particular emphasis on effect evaluations, including randomized controlled trials (RCTs), and extensive experience conducting large-scale intervention studies in real-world welfare settings. A central focus of her research is to examine how interventions can strengthen parenting, relationships, reflective functioning, and children’s psychosocial development.

Her work focuses broadly on mentalization-based interventions across different developmental stages and care contexts. This includes interventions during pregnancy and infancy (Minding the Baby), mentalization-based therapy (MBT) for foster families, and for adolescents in residential care.

Her research is characterized by close collaboration with municipalities and practice settings and aims to generate knowledge about what works, for whom, and under which conditions in child and family services.

Maiken Pontoppidan applies both quantitative and qualitative methods, including survey and register data and interviews. She also has extensive experience with feasibility, pilot, and implementation studies.

She holds a PhD in Public Health from the University of Copenhagen (2016) and a Master’s degree in History and Psychology from Roskilde University (2006). She collaborates widely with international research environments and has been a visiting researcher at Yale University, University of Minnesota, and North Dakota State University.