Martin Sokol is an economic geographer whose primary research interests revolve around social and spatial inequalities in the context of the ‘New Europe’. One of the key areas of his expertise concern the fundamental processes shaping economic geographies of contemporary Europe – the rise of the so-called ‘knowledge-based economy’ in the ‘West’ and the collapse of ‘state-socialism’ in the ‘East’ - and the implications of these two processes for cities and regions in Western and East-Central Europe. More recently, Martin has developed his research agenda to include the issues of finance and financialisation, and their implications for social and spatial inequality.