Our Alumni

Many people are associated with SSW for shorter or longer periods of time, absolving a practicum, participating in projects or in the many other activities SSW undertakes, and then continuing their journey, often to distant foreign lands. They are (temporarily or not) out of sight, but never out of heart! Therefore, they too deserve mention here, with thanks for the contributions they have made to SSW so far.

Annie Schwerdtfeger

Annie is an undergraduate student at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. She is studying International and Public Affairs with a focus in Humanitarian Aid. She has completed coursework in International and Refugee Law, Humanitarian Aid, and public policy. As an intern at Social Science Works, she will support in data analysis and social science based research methods. She is interested in learning about how NGOs contribute to shaping policy in different communities across Germany.

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.

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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 several years 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.

Maxime Kuhlmey BA

Maxime Kuhlmey started his career at SSW in October 2019. He is studying social sciences at the Humboldt University in Berlin (HU). Earlier, he spent one and a half years in Beirut (Lebanon), gaining work experience at the Orient Institute Beirut (Max-Weber Foundation) and the Friedrich Ebert Foundation. While in Lebanon again, he now finishes his Master in social science at the Humboldt University.

During his stays in Lebanon he realized once more the necessity of bringing people with different origins, values, opinions and beliefs together. Lebanon is with its 18 different religious sects one of the most diverse (and at the same time smallest) countries in the world. During his research, he found Social Science Works and their deliberative approach, that corresponds with his ideal conception of having a changing and lasting effect on people.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Lina Gessner

Lina Gessner studies Global Project and Change Management at Windesheim Honors College in Zwolle, The Netherlands. Since February 2020 she is working as an intern at SSW, where she is writing her Bachelor Thesis looking into new strategies on how to recruit and 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.
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Uwe Ruß MA

Uwe is a sociologist and philosopher. He is working on his PhD 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 supervision of Heike Solga.

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.
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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.
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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.

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.

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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.
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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.

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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.
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