Ilona Matysiak holds a PhD in sociology and works as assistant professor at M. Grzegorzewska University in Warsaw, Poland. She is also a member of the Center of Interdisciplinary Gender Studies at the Robert B. Zajonc Institute for Social Studies, University of Warsaw. Her research interests include social and demographic changes in rural areas in different countries, gender and local government, social capital and community studies. Dr. Matysiak took part in several cross-national studies, including “WILCO. Welfare innovations at the local level in favor of cohesion” (2010-2014). In the frame of the COST Action IS 1409 she has studied green care farms and care cooperatives as social innovations dealing with aging in rural areas in the Netherlands. In October 2017 Dr. Matysiak completed also her 2-years research grant on young adults with a university education living in rural areas in Poland, financed by the National Science Centre in Poland. From November 2017 to July 2018, she was a post-doc Fulbright scholar at the Institute for Social Research (ISR) at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, studying the retirement migration to nonmetropolitan areas in the U.S. As a visiting scholar at ISU, Dr. Matysiak has been implementing a research project focused on aging and senior services in selected small Iowa towns. She has published in, among others, “Sociologia Ruralis” and “Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography”.