Sophia Moskalenko and Sammy Schmidt join the group

With the start of fall term we welcome two new researchers to the group!

Sophia Moskalenko is a psychologist with a PhD in Social and Clinical Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. Her research examines radicalization, terrorism, disinformation, and conspiracy theories, with a focus on mass identity processes, self-sacrifice, and resilience to extremism. It has appeared in American Psychologist, Political Psychology , and Terrorism and Political Violence, and I have co-authored several books, including Psychology of the Extreme (Routledge, 2025), Pastels and Pedophiles (Stanford, 2021) and Radicalization to Terrorism: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford, 2020). As a research fellow at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), she led projects commissioned by the U.S. Departments of Defense, Energy, Homeland Security, and State. In her shared position with our group and the MZES, she will spend the next twelve months developing a DFG Research Grant (Sachbeihilfe) proposal for Professor Ratkovic,  the Chair of Social Data Science and a project director at the MZES. Her role will be to turn the project into a competitive proposal, combining his quantitative and computational expertise with her background in radicalization, extremism, and political polarization. You can learn more about Sophia on her personal webpage.
Sophia will also be teaching a tutorial for the course Seminar and Lab on Machine Learning and Causal Inference.

Sammy Schmidt is joining as a TA for the MMSDS course Statistics for Data Scientists, taking over the tutorial. They are currently enrolled in the Mannheim Master in Social Data Science, bringing an interdisciplinary background of Sociology, Gender Studies and Data Science to the team. Parallel to that, they are working as a researcher, combining quantitative and machine learning methods with theories from political sociology to analyze matters of democratic erosion and backsliding.