Petra Ulmanen, PhD in Social Work, is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Social Work, Stockholm University. Her research interests concern social care and social policy, focusing on long-term care and family care for older persons, and inequalities across gender, social class, and ethnicity.

Petra has explored the changing roles of the state, the family, and the market in providing care for older people, as well as the social and economic consequences of family caregiving. Her current research concerns family members' experiences of and contacts with health and social care services, and the managerial caregiving role they often assume to make care services meet the needs at hand. She is also exploring the consequences of the de-institutionalisation of Swedish eldercare for older people and their family members.

Before her PhD, she worked as a researcher, journalist and editor of cultural magazines. She participated in the set-up of the Swedish magazine Bang in the early 1990s, where she worked as editor. She worked at the National Board of Health and Welfare in a Government commission about social services from a gender perspective and was appointed by the Government to work on the Inquiry on Gender Equality Policy.