Mario Steiner joined the academic staff at IHS in 1998. Since 2016, he has been the Head of the research group Educational Structures and Educational Opportunities. From 2002 to 2024 he taught Empirical-Research-Methods and Labor-Market-Research at several Universities of Applied Sciences. Mario Steiner holds a degree in Sociology and Political Science from the University of Vienna (1995), a postgraduate degree in Sociology from the Institute for Advanced Studies, Vienna (1998) and he completed his PhD at the University of Vienna in 2017. 

His main areas of research focus on social inequality in education, disadvantaged youth, educational poverty, second chance education, educational trajectories and evaluation studies of educational programs and policy measures (e.g. the European Social Fund program in Austria). In particular, he is interested in how educational structures shape educational trajectories and influence early school leaving. He bases his research on quantitative and qualitative data.