Mag. Sonja Guttenbrunner, born in 1977, studied Political Science, European Law and Communication Science at the University of Vienna, Austria. During the academic year 1999/2000 she was an exchange student in the Erasmus Exchange Program at the University of Limerick, Ireland. In 2004 she completed her master’s thesis on the topic of "The Impact of Social Capital for the Democratization Process in Poland".

Currently she is PhD research associate in the project "Coping with Accession" at the Free University of Berlin. Her further research interest lies in the field of Social Capital in particular in regard to the accession countries.