Ilona is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. She works in the research group of professor Kazimierz M. Slomczynski on Comparative Analysis of Social Inequality and is actively involved in the two team's projects: the SDR survey data harmonization project and the Polish Panel Survey POLPAN.

Ilona defended her PhD dissertation with distinction at the Graduate School for Social Research, Warsaw in January 2018. In her dissertation, she developed a harmonized survey dataset to conduct a multi-level analysis of  corruption in public schools of Europe.

Her recent work on corruption deals with:

- using public opinion surveys to evaluate corruption in Europe

- comparability of corruption measures across surveys and its implications for ex-post harmonization 

- patterns of country participation in international surveys on corruption and its impact on corruption research

- scale and sources of perceived corruption in public schools

- how government effectiveness in fighting corruption is perceived in Poland since 1989

- how individual success strategies and attitudes to meritocracy and corruption are diversified and change

Ilona co-teaches a postgraduate course Empirical Research in the Social Sciences(ERSS): Design, Implementation, and Write-up at the Graduate School for Social Research in Warsaw.

Ilona is an active member of the Interdisciplinary Corruption Research Network since the Network's first Forum in Amsterdam, where she co-organized a session with Marina Povitkina on Quantitative methods in researching corruption: surveys,  cross-national studies, and measurement issues.