Our Fellows

Social Science Works is supported by an increasing group of Fellows.

Our fellows comprise a diverse, international group of scholars, mostly based in Germany, that share the core ideas behind Social Science Works.

They strive to contribute to the societal relevance of social science and to the quality of democratic decision making. For that account, they publish quality articles and blogs on our homepage targeting a broad audience and they can be hired by us to write second opinions on research about which they have expertise. Additionally, they regularly support our workshops – especially the ones on deliberation – as moderators and consultants.

Oktay Tuncer MA

Oktay Tuncer is a master student Social Sciences at the Humboldt-University of Berlin. Oktay completed his Undergraduate degree in the same field studying both in Berlin and in Paris. At Humboldt University he received a far-reaching education in quantitative and qualitative research methods. At the Nanterre University of Paris he acquired important theoretical insights in sub fields of sociology like socio-anthropology, political sociology and sociology of economic thinking.

Oktay gained supplementary experience in academia by working as a student assistent in research institutes such as the German Institute of Economic Research (DIW, Deutsches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung) and the Berlin Social Science Research Center (WZB, Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung).

In his studies, he focused on political and economic sociology, the sociology of inequality and research methods. The topic of his Bachelor thesis was the notion of nationality and citizenship in Turkey. For this he analyzed the ongoing debate on a new constitution.
Throughout his experiences in academia, Oktay faced the problems and obstacles of relevant, valuable and legitimate empirical research. This motivated him to become an associate of Social Science Works.

Eva Singler M.A.

Eva Singler is a passionate professional with expertise in the field of migration, integration and diversity. She aims for understanding the complex interconnectedness of the local, national and global. Eva holds a Master’s degree in International Relations and Development Policies from the University of Duisburg-Essen and a Bachelor’s degree in Hispanic Studies majoring in Political Sciences from the University of Regensburg and the Universidad Complutense of Madrid. Her research expertise focuses on policy effectiveness, evidence-based policy making and the migration development nexus.

She is an experienced practitioner. She volunteered in Ecuador and worked as a Project Manager for the German Development Cooperation on the subjects of skilled migration, diaspora cooperation and migration policy advice. Currently, she works as a Special Officer for the city administration of Frankfurt a.M. on the issues of integration, diversity and anti-discrimination. She is trained in workshop facilitation and non-violent communication. By joining deliberations she actively wants to contribute to promoting democratic values and challenging anti-pluralist thinking. She enjoys feminist literature and podcasts, hiking and hatha yoga.

Nils Wadt MA

Nils Wadt has been connected to Social Science Works from the very beginning. Nils finished his Bachelor degree in Sociology and Political Science in Cologne and Frankfurt. Both schools are grounded in different research traditions, Frankfurt with a strong background in Critical Theory (Horkheimer & Adorno, Frankfurter Schule) and Cologne with a strong background in empirical research and methodology (René König, Kölner Schule). Nils completed his graduate degree in Social Science at Humboldt University Berlin integrating the different academic backgrounds.

In his Master thesis Nils researched the political motivations and social values of civil volunteers in the refugee sector. His academic profile is leaning towards qualitative methods backed up by general competence in quantitative analysis. His qualitative focus covers methods such as genealogy, content analysis, as well as a variety of interview techniques and participatory observation.

Besides his studies, Nils Wadt worked at Chairs of Sociology, Political Theory, Psychology and Economics, gaining insights into the different research practices and epistemological groundings.

Within his work and studies in the academy, Nils Wadt apprehended the problems, contemporary social science is facing. This includes not only the separation between empirical research practice and the evaluation of its epistemological assumptions, but also the growing irrelevancy of academic research to civil society. His commitment to the project of Social Science Works is grounded in this apprehension.

Yamen Fouda BA

Yamen is an architect and urban planner from Syria. He studied at Al-Wataniya University and the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. His professional motto is “unless you put a function to your creation – it’s not architecture, it’s just visual art”. Architects not only have to create objects of beauty, but also objects that are practical and functional. To realize this goal, inputs from the social sciences are essential, which also explains Yamens interest in a cooperation with Social Science Works. In the deliberative workshops of SSW in the refugee home in Wünsdorf Yamen was one of the most involved participants. Having experienced the consequences of a lack social deliberation in Syria, he would like to contribute to the spread of deliberation in more and more communities.

Florentin Münstermann MA

Florentin Münstermann is a German graduate of the Erasmus School of Economics Rotterdam, currently living in Potsdam. He holds a Master in Economics and Business Economics, with a focus in Political Economics. Throughout his life he acquired a lot of international and multicultural experiences, which range from living a year abroad in Beijing, studying at an international school in Berlin and participating in an exchange semester at Bocconi University Milan during his bachelor studies in Rotterdam. Flo’s political interests stem from the increasingly controversial political debates and crisis around the globe. He rounded off his Bachelor with a thesis on the topic of political enfranchisement, voting behaviors of expatriate voters and their changing roles modern political campaigns. Flo is also interested in sports and music, and holds a certificate in Music Production and Sound Engineering from dBs Berlin.

Anne Flake MA

Anne Flake is a recent Public Policy graduate of the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin. Before joining the Hertie School of Governance, Anne majored in International Development (BA) at Leiden University College, and worked at local NGOs in Turkey, Myanmar and the Netherlands. Anne previously worked with GIZ for a multisector programme aimed at strengthening the resilience of refugees and host-communities in Syria’s neighbouring countries. For her master thesis, Anne conducted field research in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq to study the concept of procedural legitimacy in the interaction between local (government) stakeholders and external aid actors.

Anne is specifically interested in challenges related to inclusive education, (forced) migration, governance in areas of limited statehood, human rights in authoritarian and conflict-affected contexts, and social policy. She believes that deliberation and participatory approaches to policy-making are valuable tools to building more inclusive societies – be they in Germany, the Netherlands or beyond.

Andrew Sorota

Andrew is an undergraduate student at Yale University. He is interested in the nexus of political thought and affect theory, studying the ways in which institutions, public policy, and societal norms shape individual lived experience. As a Dahl Scholar at the Yale Institution for Social and Policy Studies, Andrew researches democratic precarity in the United States amidst increasing national diversity. He has also researched institution building efforts in the West Bank through the International Legal Foundation and was selected as a fellow for the Peace and Dialogue Leadership Initiative. At Yale, Andrew has previously served as the Chair of the largest forum for leftist thought on campus, the Chief of Staff of the only student-run political action committee in the United States, and a tutor at a local correctional institution. He has also worked on several progressive political campaigns.

Isabel Navarro BA

Isabel Navarro was our Spanish intern for the summer of 2019. Isabel comes from a small town in Valencia and is currently studying International Studies and Law at Carlos III University of Madrid. Her studies are strongly interdisciplinary: sociology, politics, statistics, demography, globalization and economy. She also studied the law. Some of her main interests are inequalities, democracy, and minority and women’s rights.

Her cultural curiosity brought her to attend several courses in Germany and Austria over the past years, and to participating in several volunteering projects in Spain. Although her home University is in Madrid, she has spent two exchange semesters at the Charles University in Prague and two semesters at the University of Valencia. Isabel finishes her studies in 2020 and she spend the summer of 2019 improving her understanding of democracy, deliberation, populism and German culture. at SSW she especially devoted time to analyze the statistical data gathered over the last couple of years by Social Science Works.

Alice Lorch BA

Alice Lorch worked on the Canarian Island Teneriffa for the Loro Parqué Foundation after finishing an apprenticeship as a state-approved foreign language correspondent. During her work, she made her first experiences in project management and member support. In 2010 she moved back to Germany and started working in the cultural department of the German-Polish Foundation Genshagen. There, she improved her skills in project management, controlling and public relations. At the same time, Alice graduated in International Business Communication at the private AKAD university in Leipzig. She wrote her bachelor thesis about the potential projects for the societal integration of refugees. Since October 2019, she works as a freelance project manager at Social Science Works.

Lina Gessner BA

Lina Gessner was our spring intern of 2020. Lina studied Global Project and Change Management at Windesheim Honors College in Zwolle, The Netherlands. At SSW she wrote her Bachelor Thesis looking into new strategies on how to recruit participants for deliberative democratic events.

In her studies, Lina has had the chance to work on projects both in The Netherlands and abroad experiencing first-hand some of the global issues our society is facing and was able to develop her interest in peacebuilding, mediation, and integration of migrants.

During her research for a suitable internship organization, she came across SSW and liked the approach of using scientific knowledge to improve civil society by holding deliberative events, where many different voices, beliefs, values, and opinions come together and have a chance to impact each other by creating a conversation in a safe space.

Gabrielle Denman

Gabrielle was our intern for the Autumn of 2019. She is from Austin, Texas and is currently working to complete her undergraduate degree in Supply Chain Management at the University of Texas at Austin and has just completed a semester abroad at Copenhagen Business School. She has earned a certificate in Core Texts and Ideas, a field of study based on the analysis of the “great books” of human history, which discuss human nature, ethics, and the meaning of life from various perspectives. She is especially interested in a career working with startup NGOs which are dedicated to creating sustainable solutions to help stabilize the world’s refugee crisis and has experience volunteering with such NGOs in Europe, as well as working at a tech startup in the USA.

Paul Börsting BA

Paul Börsting graduated from Tilburg University in Netherlands with a bachelor degree in “Liberal Arts and Sciences” majoring in Social Sciences. During his interdisciplinary study he focused on a diverse number of topics mainly in the realm of political sciences and sociology, such as migration, identity, international relations, the European Union and political theory. He finished his degree with a bachelor thesis on the expectations, motivations and effects of volunteering by refugees in Germany. In the first half of 2018, Paul was an intern at Social Science Works. Currently, he finishes his Masters at the Freie Universität Berlin and the Sciences Po in Paris.

Besides that, Paul enjoys getting to know other cultures and people – may it be on his travels, during his one year volunteer service in South India, in international workcamps or during his exchange semester in Hong Kong. Additionally, he enjoys music, company, food, hiking and podcasts.

Emma Eden BA

Emma Eden is a Palestinian Israeli graduate from Max Stern Yezreel Valley College in Israel. She studied Psychology and Criminology as part of her dual subject bachelor. During her studies, Emma participated in Model United Nations (MUN) that prepares students to debate social and political topics in conferences all over the world. She worked with youth in distress for 3 years, gathering perspectives on complex social issues. Furthermore, as an Arab woman growing up in Israel she observed the Israeli – Palestinian conflict from both sides and from different perspectives. She examined this in her BA thesis on the integration of Arab female students in Israel. This integration creates an ethnic identity dilemma and Emma analyzed their way of coping with it. Additionally, Emma led a workshop bridging Arab and Jewish students and encouraging them to open a conversation touching on both their issues and concerns. She is currently in Germany, and is researching forced emigration and human rights from a social cognitive perspective.

Emily Frank MA

Emily Frank is a Project Assistant at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, working on a European Commission project studying how select countries apply the broad concept of “vulnerability” in asylum law and how protection seekers experience this concept. As an incoming doctoral researcher, she is interested in how interactions with street-level bureaucrats shape immigration outcomes.

Emily holds a BA in sociology from New York University and a Master’s degree in Public Affairs from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Before obtaining her Master’s, she spent two years working at the Urban Justice Center, a nonprofit organisation in New York City. There, she represented low-income and migrant individuals and families facing legal issues with social assistance benefits. She also supported educational and activist efforts around welfare state issues. At UW-Madison, Emily also led diversity and inclusion work and continues to engage in similar efforts to support diversity and inclusion in the city of Berlin.

Namitha Vivek MA

Namitha has always been severely curious about systems and the way they work. This led her to finish a masters in Physics from Chennai, India and more recently graduate with a masters in International Relations and Cultural Diplomacy from Furtwangan University in the Schwarzwald. Her master thesis examined the effects of the migration crisis on post-war German national identity.

She spent the first half of 2019 working at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. This experience highlighted the need to establish strong multisectoral partnerships and retain the relevance of academia in becoming tangible to civil society. At Social Science Works she has set out to do just that.
She has studied conflicts of various kinds in India, Germany and Israel and is interested in identity politics, gender theory, forced migration and statelessness, and social hierarchy. In her free time she enjoys marathon walks in forests, rowing, meeting people over numerous cups of ginger tea and attempts to conquer the infamously hard German language.

Drop her an email at namitha.vivek27@gmail.com

Ole Oeltjen MA

Ole Oeltjen is a political scientist. After receiving his BA from Freiburg University he studied an MA at the Free University of Berlin. In his MA thesis Ole analyzed the role of camp operators in the accommodation of asylum seekers in Berlin. Subsequently, he worked at the Humboldt University of Berlin and at Bielefeld University, where he did research on local migration control.

Besides migration and asylum policies, Ole is interested in the relationship and tensions between citizenship, civil rights and security policies, which he especially focused on during a semester at the University of Copenhagen. Furthermore, he spent a semester at the New University of Lisbon and completed an internship at the Friedrich-Ebert-Foundation’s office in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Ole is currently pursuing a second degree in law studies at the Humboldt University of Berlin.

Alessia Arbustini MA

Alessia is a Master student of Gender Studies with special reference to the Middle East at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London. She holds a BA in Anthropology, Religion and Oriental Civilization at University of Bologna, Italy. Her main research interests lie in queer and feminist diaspora studies, migration and displacement, gender issues related to new nationalisms and feminist and queer knowledge production. She has always been actively involved in grassroots and local organizations concerning topics such as human trafficking, sexuality, gender performance, and migration. She is currently working on her MA thesis on the representation of Muslim women (and men) by right-wing propaganda in Italy.

Phillip Reißenweber MA

Phillip Reißenweber is a political scientist and doctoral candidate at the University of Greifswald. During the course of his study his main area of interest comprised contemporary questions of political theory as well as questions of methodology and research designs. He is also a communications coach, trained in Nonviolent Communication based on the approach by Marshall B. Rosenberg. His experience with this approach towards intra- as well as interpersonal conflict resolution, with its emphasis on emotions and needs, led him to believe that emotional development is an important prerequisite for the accomplishment of democratic values like political equality and social justice. In his M.A. thesis he brought political science and Nonviolent Communication together by analysing the connections between cognitive-evaluative theories of emotions and the principles behind representative democracy. His PhD thesis partly continues this project by analysing the role of emotions in political deliberation and investigating possible designs for real-world deliberative settings. Settings which are capable to integrate even subtle aspects of
emotionality into public discourse. Besides all that Phillip is a passionate Balfolk dancer, he loves to read novels, cycling and he enjoys listening to music.

Jeanne Lenders MA

Jeanne graduated with distinction for her Master in European Studies at King’s College London, after spending the final semester at the Humboldt University in Berlin. She also holds a first-class Bachelor’s degree in English Language and Culture from the Radboud University Nijmegen. For her Master’s thesis, she conducted semi-structured interviews with young, male Afghan asylum seekers in Berlin, focussing on their displacement experience and views on German culture and gender relations. Previously, she has volunteered for the Boat Refugee Foundation in Lesvos, where she coordinated an Afghan women’s support group. Next to that, she contributed as a research assistant to a human-rights think tank in Malta and completed a training on refugee inclusion in Southern Italy. Her main research interests lie in social coherence, the power dynamics between majority and minority populations, and the gendered aspects of forced migration.

Akram Yacob MA

Akram Yacob graduated from the Hertie School of Governance with a Master in Public Policy. After spending 6 months at the United Nations Volunteers in Bonn, he wrote his thesis on the topic of improving social media stakeholder engagement using Big Data, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. Prior to that, he graduated from the Singapore Management University with a Bachelor of Social Science, majoring in Sociology and Corporate Communication. Over the years, his research interests have gravitated towards technology, urbanization and development.

Born and raised in Singapore, he worked for several years in the government in Singapore. Additionally, he has been part of several start-ups from public-service platforms to decentralized AI platforms. He loves animals and has spent time volunteering with the Animal Concerns Research and Education Society (Singapore) and the Animal Care Center of NYC (ACC).

Mariana Zarpellon BA

Mariana Zarpellon graduated from Universidade Federal do Paraná with a bachelor’s degree in Social Sciences, majoring in Anthropology and Archaeology. During her studies, she worked at the university’s archaeological laboratory (CEPA) and did fieldwork with the people living at an abandoned construction site at her hometown in Brazil. Throughout the four years in which the research took place, many topics were brought up by the relation she stablished with her interlocutors, such as homelessness, statelessness, substance dependency and social marginalization. The field research eventually led to the production of an ethnographic film called Fala de Mim, which was later evaluated in her graduation monograph.

She has a previous bachelor’s degree in Social Communication and has worked as a photographer since 2008.

Raíssa Silveira MA

Raíssa is a Brazilian Masters student for Political Science at Universidade Federal de Pernambuco – Brazil, currently in Germany to expand her research on modern antisemitism. She is a BA in International Relations and a former intern for her country’s Ministry of Foreign Relations on Human Rights issues. Raíssa was also a volunteer for Palestinians’ rights and she specialized in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, when her desire to advocate against antisemitism also arose. Furthermore, she has interest for democracy studies, international organizations, media studies, forced migration, MENA studies, theology and political philosophy. She will take part in the Brazilian delegation to TUFTS University – Boston Symposium on Migration in a Turbulent World. She loves travelling and learning languages, and looks forward to developing relevant and accessible research.

Abdulrahman Kadi BA

Abdulrahman is a Master student of Cultural Science at the FU Berlin, studying the intellectual encounters among the three religions in the medieval Islamic world. He holds a Bachelor degree in Economics/Business Administration from Aleppo University in Syria, which he insisted to finish during the most dangerous phase of the Syrian war.

Abdulrahman started his social involvement at the age of 17 as a volunteer at Albirr association in Homs- Syria. As the Syrian crisis started, he became a Junior-Trainer of Life Skills program certified by UNICEF. In addition to that he volunteered at the Syrian Red Crescent as a health promoter and joined the Syrian Network for Building Peace.

Later on, he moved to Lebanon where he worked with different NGOs in the fields of education and relief, and finally joined a United Nation agency (UNRWA) as a social mobilizer working with the Palestinian refugee communities.

Finally, at 2016, he moved to Berlin to pursue his postgraduate studies. Abdulrahman is also interested in arts; he paints, makes photos, videos, does some voice acting, and used to sing in the Berlin State Opera’s choir. When he has free time left he enjoys cooking and eating.

Uwe Ruß MA

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Uwe is a sociologist and philosopher. Currently, he is finishing his Ph.D. thesis on the relationship between people’s attitudes towards the welfare state and their support for the political system in their country. Prior to that Uwe has worked as research associate and lecturer at the Institute of Sociology at Freie Universität Berlin, where he was giving courses on empirical social research, sociological theory, and statistical data analysis. His research interests lie within the fields of social inequality, the sociology of education, and political attitudes.

During his studies at the University of Göttingen, Uwe spend a year abroad at Uppsala University for the study of sociology, history, and Holocaust and genocide studies, and volunteered at the Swedish Committee Against Antisemitism. He conducted his Magister thesis on meritocratic beliefs, educational inequalities, and the income distribution in modern welfare states at the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB) under the supervision of Heike Solga.

Asaf Leshem MA

Asaf is a PhD candidate at the iDTR (Institute for Dark Tourism Research) at the University of Central Lancashire. Focusing on the large yet under-researched dark tourism segment in Berlin, his research is concerned with tour guides’ interpretation, in their role as mediators or ‘Ambassadors of the City’ (Botschafter der Stadt).

Prior to moving to Berlin, Asaf graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Ecotourism from the University of Central Lancashire. In his final thesis, he compared the roles and responsibilities of private and NGO ecotourism stakeholders in Ethiopia. In Berlin’s Humboldt University’s Agriculture and Horticulture Faculty, Asaf completed a master degree in Integrated Natural Resource Management (environmental economics). For his master thesis, as part of the LILAC project (Living Landscapes China), he researched socio-environmental coevolution within the team’s focus on adoption of agricultural innovations in the Nabanhe Nature Reserve, China.

His choice of research topics, as well as his interest in Social Science Works, derives from his wish to find the balance between adding to scientific knowledge, and making that knowledge useful, accessible, and common outside the academic circles.

Sergiu Lucaci MA

Sergiu Lucaci is a PhD fellow in political science at the Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences. Upon receiving his BA degree from Jacobs University Bremen, he has pursued master studies at Cardiff University and Humboldt University Berlin. With a general interest in social and political theory, Sergiu is currently researching particular forms of civil society activity in the European Union in the aftermath of the financial crisis. His focus is on networks of non-governmental organizations that try to attain the status of legitimate contributors to the field of financial regulation. From a theoretical angle emphasizing the role of knowledge production, he seeks to uncover how civil society advocacy in a technical policy field is structured by the EU politico-administrative order through its various uses of outside expertise.

Alexandra Johansen BA

Alexandra is currently in her third year at the University of Copenhagen, studying political science. In the Autumn of 2017, she has been on exchange in Birmingham, UK. In the winter of 2017 she was a very appreciated intern at Social Science Works. Before Copenhagen, she spent a year studying political science at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, PA in the US. In the States, Alexandra became increasingly interested in social inequality. This stay also peaked her interest in international politics in general, but mostly regarding war and military interventions, as well as the immigration it creates. The impact these international forces have on democracy within states and the EU, is thus something she finds urgently relevant to study today. Altogether, the interconnectedness of war, inequality, and democracy is why she studies political science.

Sarah Coughlan MA

Sarah Coughlan is co-founder of Social Science Works. She earned her MA at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin in 2014 where her thesis looked at educational inequality and the policy discourse that surrounds the debate. During her MA she worked on issues relating to housing and social policy as well as the question of ‘usable knowledge’ and the role of social science in the wider world. Before coming to the HU in 2012, she studied European Social and Political Studies at University College London where she specialized political philosophy and Italian, and spent a year studying in Rome. Her primary interests at Social Science Works are education, housing and social issues and the misuse of research that empowers poor policy, particularly in her native Britain; she is interested above all else in inequality in all its forms. Her motivation in joining Social Science Works stems from frustration in the academy’s inability to make any meaningful inroads into society’s biggest issues and resistance to anything that attempts to go beyond incremental change.

Jada Lindblom MA

Jada Lindblom is a doctoral student at Arizona State University in Phoenix, Arizona, USA, in the School of Community Resources and Development. She serves as a research assistant at the University’s Center for Sustainable Tourism (https://scrd.asu.edu/sustainabletourism). Among her varied research interests, she investigates residents’ sense of place and pride in tourism settings, tourism development in post-war regions, and the significant tourism roles filled by people who work in the periphery of the industry. Her academic pursuits have arisen in part from her experiences as a practitioner in outdoor recreation and adventure tourism, in which she observed the educational and psychological benefits of travel and leisure, but also the considerable environmental and cultural detriments of the industry. She received a B.A. in Environmental Studies from Scripps College (Claremont, California) and a M.S. in Parks, Recreation and Tourism from the University of Utah.

Christian Kipp MA

Christian Kipp currently studies mathematics at TU Berlin. He holds a master’s degree in Social Science from HU Berlin. In his master’s thesis in Social Science, Christian discussed Ernest Gellner’s theory of nationalism from a philosophical perspective. The topic of his bachelor’s thesis in mathematics is at the intersection of geometric functional analysis and statistics. Christian’s support of SSW is based on the belief that science and democracy should be understood as two aspects of humanism, which can only exist as a unity.

Michael Häfelinger MA

Michael Häfelinger is economist, sociologist, and health care researcher. He works as a business consultant (www.unternehmercoaches.de) and is the Managing Director of the Berlin Institute for public health (www.biph.de).

His academic heart beats for equal opportunities. At TOPOS city research he was jointly responsible for the determination of rent ceilings in redevelopment and environmental protection areas. He also developed the set of indicators for the social report of the State of Brandenburg. Later he worked at the Robert-Koch-Institute on the poverty and wealth report of the Federal Government and co-designed the federal health survey.

These predominantly analytical level he left with entering the Berlin Institute for Public Health. Here he devotes himself to the implementation of health promotion measures in the workplace and city neighborhoods. As a management consultant for cooperation, he is specialized in participation and esteeming communication in corporations.

Dr. Sergiu Buscaneanu

Sergiu Buscaneanu is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the Department of European & International Studies, King’s College London (KCL). Before moving to KCL, he has been visiting fellow at Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki; visiting researcher at the Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Uppsala University; research fellow at the Hanse Institute for Advanced Study and visiting researcher at the Institute for European Integration, University of Hamburg. Sergiu Buscaneanu holds a PhD (2014) in political science from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and researched also towards his dissertation at Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto.

Sergiu Buscaneanu’s main research interests lie at two academic intersections. The first disciplinary intersection connects political science with cognitive psychology and concerns regional integration choices of ruling elites from Eastern Partnership (EaP) countries and prospect theory. The second sub-disciplinary intersection connects comparative politics with IR and concerns EU external governance, democratisation, regime dynamics, democratic diffusion in EaP region and former Soviet Union more broadly. He is the author of Regime Dynamics in EU’s Eastern Neighbourhood: EU Democracy Promotion, International Influences, and Domestic Contexts published in 2016 with Palgrave Macmillan.

Lily Cichanowicz BA

Lily Cichanowicz is currently doing her MA at Freie Universität Berlin where her research focuses on trajectories of capitalism, modern regimes, and emergent social movements. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Cornell University in 2015 where she studied Development Sociology with a concentration in Inequality studies. She has spent time living, working, and studying in numerous countries across Europe, Latin America, and Southeast Asia, experiences which also inform her approach and contributions to projects at Social Science Works.

Mafalda Sandrini MA

Mafalda is currently doing her PhD at the Free University in Berlin under the Organizational Communication Division of the Institute for Media and Communication Studies. While studying her master in Media and Communication Management at Macromedia University of Applied Sciences, Mafalda worked on the research project The Moving Networked, developed by the BoP – Board of Participation Association and the Allianz Kulturstiftung, aimed at creating intercultural bridges between the refugee and local community by implementing lectures and workshops in refugee camps and other facilities. In her dissertation Mafalda is deepening the approach by adopting a meso perspective in order to investigate how organizations are connected within the networked public sphere by adopting social network analysis. Particularly, she is interested in examining the relationships between governmental organizations, NGOs and organizations funded by refugees, in Berlin, in order to gather a holistic picture of relationships’ patterns and their structure.

Paula Herrera MA

Paula Herrera is a Public Policy candidate at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin. She is convinced that civil society and its think tanks are key players in the formation of fair, creative and active societies. Connected to this, policy-making must be developed hand-in-glove with a profound reflection on the means of achieving efficient results.

Before arriving to Germany in 2015, Paula worked at the Trade Commission of France in Mexico as an intern for Aeronautical and Security issues, where she helped to facilitate personalized market studies to the French private sector. Previously, Paula worked in different prominent non-governmental institutions; namely at the Colegio de México as a fellow researcher, and at OXFAM LAC, as an assistant of both HR and Business Management departments. Moreover, she has collaborated with the Centro de Estudios Espinosa Yglesias, which is a Mexican non-profit civil association, whose mission is to enrich political debate with policy advice and shed light on governmental decision-processes. Furthermore, in her spare time Paula is an active supporter of the LGBT minority’s organizations.

She holds a BA in Political Science from the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (2009-2012), where she graduated with special honours after presenting a thesis that analyses the relationship between the electoral reforms, the economical positions and the degree of democracy of the different Venezuelan regimes. During her BA, Paula travelled to France for an exchange semester at Science Po Strasbourg, where she took several courses related to European Institutions and their contemporary challenges. Thanks to her multicultural upbringing, she is at home in the English, French and Spanish language and culture. Nowadays, she is learning German.

Ilyas Saliba MA

Ilyas Saliba is a research fellow at the Research Unit on Democracy and Democratization at the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB) and a PhD candidate at the Berlin Graduate School for Social Sciences (BGSS) at Humboldt University Berlin. He holds a BA from the University of Hamburg in political Science and a MA in Comparative and international Studies from the ETH (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) and University of Zurich.

Ilyas’ research lies at the intersection of comparative politics, international relations and regional studies on Middle Eastern politics & societies. He is working on a topic from a comparative political science angle but building on and communicating to other disciplinary fields. The problems he encounters as a consequence of this has motivated him to rethink some of the fundamental assumptions and paradigms that dominate the social sciences.

In his dissertation he explores political decision making and strategies of incumbent regimes and governments during times of public contestation in Morocco and Egypt.

Patrick Sullivan MA

Patrick Sullivan is a 2018 Master of Public Policy candidate at the Hertie School of Governance. Originally from Milwaukee, Wisconsin in the United States, he has Bachelor’s degrees in Economics, Secondary Education, Political Science and History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and participated in an exchange semester at Bocconi University in Milan, Italy during his time as an undergraduate. He credits his time abroad for making him a more empathetic, curious, and worldly person. Following his Bachelor’s, he taught courses in Economics, Government, and History –and coached American Football and Golf- in the Shorewood School District in Milwaukee. The areas of study that he is particularly passionate about include wealth and income inequality, behavioral economics, and American politics. Patrick was an intern at Social Science Works in 2017.