Resume

Michael Benzinger is a PhD student at the Professorship of Computational Social Science and Big Data at the TUM School of Social Sciences and Technology. His research focuses on organizational network analysis in transactions and transformations of organizations, within the context of mergers and acquisitions. In particular, his attention lies on communication aspects, collaboration and leadership as well as organizational development.

His academic experience lies in business and management since he has received a degree in Business Administration (B.Sc.), International Business (B.A.), and Management (M.A.) including international study exchanges in Great Britain and Canada.

Michael has professional experience in the corporate environment and a profound track record in management consulting. Besides his research he is currently working as a Senior Manager in a large service firm, in the field of People, Organization, and Change-Management.

Resume

Sophie is a PhD candidate at the Chair of Computational Social Science with a background in political science and politics and technology. Her research interests are the political implications of Artificial Intelligence, its regulation and Social Media Analysis.

Resume

Nora Kirkizh is a researcher at GESIS, Department of Computational Social Science and an external PhD candidate at TU Munich, Professorship of Computational Social Science. Her interests include political behavior, experiments and computational methods. Nora works for a project on populism in Europe and the US funded by Volkswagen Foundation. She collaborates with three other scholars: Sebastian Stier (GESIS), Caterina Froio (Sciences Po) and Ralph Schroeder (University of Oxford). Nora uses online experiments and web tracking data to measure political behavior and attitudes. Her research project "Experimentally Measuring Instagram Effects on User Well-Being" was among the finalists for the 2020 Facebook Fellowship Program.

Nora received her MA in Political Science from the University of Mannheim, where she also was a research assistant at the Center for European Social Research (MZES) under supervision of Nikolay Marinov. She also has an M.A. degree in Sociology from the Higher School of Economics in Saint-Petersburg, Russia, where she studied social analysis and worked for the Internet Studies Lab. She graduated from Saint-Petersburg State University, having majored in Journalism. She also worked for media outlets and tech companies including Yandex in Russia.
 

Research

Biased Media and Foreign Policy Preferences: Evidence from a Quasi-Experiment (Working paper), 2019.

What do “the People” Want? Exploring Policy Preferences of Populist Radical Right Voters in Advanced Democracies with Conjoint Experiments and Web Tracking Data (In progress), 2019, jointly with Sebastian Stier (GESIS).

Publications

Kirkizh, Nora, and Olessia Koltsova. 2020 (Forthcoming). "Online News Consumption and Protest Participation in a Political Context." Social Media + Society.

Stier, Sebastian, Nora Kirkizh, Caterina Froio, and Ralph Schroeder. 2020 (Forthcoming). "Populist attitudes and selective exposure to online news – A cross-country analysis combining web tracking and surveys." The International Journal of Press/Politics.
 

Conferences

Kirkizh, Nora. 2019. "Biased Media and Foreign Policy Preferences: Evidence from a Quasi-Experiment." 4th Economics of Media Bias Workshop, WZB Berlin Social Science Center, Germany, 22.02.2019.

Stier, Sebastian, Nora Kirkizh, Caterina Froio, and Ralph Schroeder. 2019. "Populist Attitudes and Selective Exposure to News." ECPR General Conference 2019, Universität Wroclaw, 04.09.2019.

Kirkizh, Nora, Sebastian Stier, Caterina Froio, and Ralph Schroeder. 2019. "Populist Attitudes and Selective Exposure to News." Workshop Digital Threats to Democracy, new york, 13.06.2019.

Stier, Sebastian, Nora Kirkizh, Caterina Froio, and Ralph Schroeder. 2019. "Populist attitudes and selective exposure to news." EPSA Conference 2019.

Stier, Sebastian, Nora Kirkizh, Caterina Froio, and Ralph Schroeder. 2019. "Populist attitudes and selective exposure to news." Linking surveys and context data, Universität Wien, 26.09.2019.

Resume

Lena Maier is a PhD candidate at the Chair of Computational Social Science at the School of Social Sciences and Technology, Technical University Munich. Her research is mainly focused on social identity and political self-representation in the context of social media.

Lena received her Bachelor’s degree (B.Sc.) as well as her Master’s degree (M.Sc.) at the Universities of Stuttgart and Hohenheim. She has professional experience in the corporate environment and top-management consulting where she among other things focused on digital transformations and digital talent.

Resume

Daniel is a PhD candidate at the professorship of Computational Social Science and Big Data. He has a background in Mathematics, Computer Science and Philosophy. His main areas of interest are social networks, opinion dynamics, and the effects of digitalization on democracy and and public discourse with a focus on natural language capabilities of artificial intelligence.

Resume

Siegfried Müller is a PhD student at the Professorship of Computational Social Science and Big Data at the TUM School of Governance at the Technical University of Munich. In his research, he works with data from massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) and their use in network analysis to study team dynamics and leadership structures. In particular, his current focus is on the investigation of communication networks and their influence on team performance.

Siegfried Müller studied economics at the University of Passau, Ludwigs-Maximilians-University and the Université du Maine from 1999 to 2005. In addition to his doctorate, Siegfried Müller is active as an entrepreneur and coach. Among other things, he was co-founder of the gaming company Travian Games GmbH in Munich and is currently a member of the advisory board of the telematics service provider Invers GmbH in Siegen/Cologne.

Resume

Anahit Sargsyan is a PhD student at the Professorship of Computational Social Science and Big Data of the TUM School of Governance at the Technical University of Munich. She earned her Master of Engineering from American University of Armenia in 2017, and Bachelor of Arts in English Language and Literature from Yerevan State University in 2014. From 2017-2018 she was with the Department of Computing and Information Science at Masdar Institute (currently Khalifa University) as a visiting scholar.  During the period between 2018-2022 Anahit was with the Social Science department at New York University Abu Dhabi as a Teaching Instructor while also actively involved in a number of research projects focusing on human-bot interaction, misinformation analysis and spatio-temporal effect of COVID-19 on attitude and behavioral changes across different countries. Anahit’s research lies at the intersection of Computational Social Science, Data Science and AI. 

Selected Publications

Reichelt, Malte, Kinga Makovi, and Anahit Sargsyan. "The impact of COVID-19 on gender inequality in the labor market and gender-role attitudes." European Societies 23.sup1 (2021): S228-S245.

Abascal, Maria, Kinga Makovi, and Anahit Sargsyan. "Unequal treatment toward copartisans versus non-copartisans is reduced when partisanship can be falsified." PloS one 16.1 (2021): e0244651.

Sargsyan, Anahit, et al. "Explainable AI as a social microscope: A case study on academic performance." International Conference on Machine Learning, Optimization, and Data Science. Springer, Cham, 2020.

Salganik, Matthew J., et al. "Measuring the predictability of life outcomes with a scientific mass collaboration." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117.15 (2020): 8398-8403.

Resume

Miriam Schirmer is a PhD student at the Professorship of Computational Social Science and Big Data at the TUM School of Governance. She is currently working as a research associate at the Chair of Methods in Empirical Educational Research at the University of Regensburg and is doing her PhD externally on the topic of "Mixed Methods in Genocide Research".

Her research is mainly concerned with the analysis of witness testimonies in international genocide tribunals and is located at the interface of history, psychology, and (computational) methods.

Miriam studied Political Science (B.A.) and History (B.A.) at LMU Munich as well as Psychology (B.Sc.) and Criminology and Violence Research (M.A.) at the University of Regensburg and the University of Toronto.

Selected publications

Schirmer, M., Kruschwitz, U., & Donabauer, G. (2022). A New Dataset for Topic-Based Paragraph Classification in Genocide-Related Court Transcripts. arXiv preprint arXiv:2204.02712.

Resume

Janine is a PhD candidate at the Chair of Computational Social Science. In her research she studies politicaly motivated violence and political protest, antifascism, social movements and stigmatisation and labeling processes.

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Franz Waltenberger is a PhD student at the Professorship of Computational Social Science and Big Data at the TUM School of Governance at the Technical University of Munich. He received his Bachelor’s degree in “Management & Technology” 2017 at the TUM and his Master’s degree in “Politics. Economics. Philosophy” 2020 at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. He is researching the effects of comment section intervention mechanisms for increased discourse quality in online social networks.

Besides his research at the Professorship of Computational Social Science and Big Data, Franz is a member of the management team at the Center for Digital Technology and Management (CDTM), a joint institution of both TUM and LMU Munich.

Resume

Benedict Witzenberger is a PhD student at the Professorship of Computational Social Science and Big Data at the TUM School of Governance at the Technical University of Munich. He received his Bachelor (Political Science and History) 2014 and his Master (Political Science) 2017 at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich. The topic of his master thesis was: "Administrative Action and Transparency Policies in Municipalities". 
Since 2017 he has been working as a data journalist at the Süddeutsche Zeitung and is doing his doctorate externally on the topic "Advanced statistical methods in data journalism". His research focuses on complex methods and their explanation and visualization when applied in journalistic articles. It is located at the interface between communication science, statistics and computer science.