Milena is Associate Professor and Rosalind Franklin Fellow at the Faculty of Economics and Business at the University of Groningen and a Nonresident Fellow at the Brookings Institution. She is also an Editor of the Journal of Population Economics and served as its Managing Editor between 2014 and 2017 and an Associate Editor between 2019 and 2022. Milena acts as the GLO Cluster Lead for "Economics of Happiness". Her research interests are at the intersection of labor economics, development economics, and subjective well-being and her work has been published in outlets, such as the Journal of Public Economics, World Development, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Journal of Comparative Economics, and the Journal of Population Economics.