Our Team

The Centre will house a core research team of early career researchers who will be incentivised to cross disciplinary boundaries, grow in independence, and attract additional funding. At the same time, the Centre will host visiting internationally-leading scientists and scholars to complement our existing projects or bring new ones. The Centre’s Steering Committee will have a marked intellectual presence that will facilitate its disciplinary expansion and international visibility.

Over the next few months we will recruit between 3 and 5 post-doctoral research fellows who will form the first generation of scientists and scholars for the Centre. This team will be assisted by a Lab Manager. An Advisory Board of world-leading scientists and scholars will be actively engaged with the development of the Centre's vision.

The Centre will be directed by Manos Tsakiris.

Over the next few weeks we will be posting details here about the recruitment process and selection criteria for the first generation of fellows who will join us.

          Manos Tsakiris is Professor of Psychology at the Department of Psychology, Royal Holloway, University of London where he leads the Lab of Action & Body and the INtheSELF ERC-funded project. He is also leading the BIAS (Body & Image in Arts & Science) project, funded by the NOMIS Foundation, at the Warburg Institute, School of Advanced Study, University of London.

Katerina Michalakis

Lab Manager & Research Assistant

          Katerina completed her M.Sc. in Computational Neuroscience and Cognitive Robotics at the University of Birmingham and an undergraduate degree in Psychology at the University of Crete. Her thesis presented a computational framework that delineated the impact of emotional valence and intensity to selective attention modalities and inhibitory responses to task – irrelevant information. Katerina is interested in the affective and physiological processes that underpin intergroup relations and political behaviour.

You can get in touch with Katerina here

Katharina Lawall

Fellow in Political Science

Katharina is a quantitative social scientist who works on political behaviour, campaigns and gender. She is currently completing her PhD in Political Science at the London School of Economics and Political Science. In an era of polarization, voters often strongly dislike one or more political parties. Katharina studies the consequences of these strong feelings of dislike, or negative partisanship, in multi-party systems. What does really disliking a party do to voters? How do parties try to get rid of their “toxic” reputations – and does it work ?

To answer these questions, Katharina uses survey experiments, field experiments and causal inference methods. Katharina has conducted research in the UK, Canada, Germany and Norway, and has experience working with civil society organisations, political parties and campaigns. Her research has been funded by the Berlin Social Science Center, the Canadian Consortium for Electoral Democracy, the Carrie Chapman Catt Prize for Research on Women and Politics at Iowa State University and the LSE US Centre. Previously, Katharina has completed a Master’s degree in European Politics and Society at the University of Oxford (2018, with distinction) and an undergraduate degree at University College London (2016, with distinction).

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Key expertise/research interests: Political Behaviour, Political Psychology, Experiments

https://katharinalawall.com/

Ionela Bara

Fellow in Psychology and Aesthetics

Ionela completed her BSc, MSc, and PhD in Psychology at Bangor University (UK) and a BA in Art History at Babes-Bolyai University (Romania) and a MA in Art Image Studies at Bucharest University (Romania). Her research interest focuses on understanding the cognitive and neural mechanisms involved in aesthetic experience.

As a member of the Centre, Ionela will be researching the transformative power of arts, as part of the EU-funded ARTIS project 

you can email Ionela here

Ben Tappin

Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow 

Ben received his PhD from the Department of Psychology, Royal Holloway University of London for a thesis that investigated the social and political psychology of belief formation, primarily using experiments both online and in the lab. Following his PhD, he joined Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a postdoctoral researcher in the Human Cooperation Lab. There he developed lines of research on politically motivated reasoning and the influence of political communication on public opinion, using large-scale experiments, multilevel regression, and meta-analysis.

​At the Centre and over the next three years, Ben will develop his Leverhulme-funded project “Understanding the Power of Political Microtargeting”.

You can visit Ben's website here

Post-doc Fellows in Political Science/Political Neuroscience/ Computational Social Sciences/Digital Humanities 

We are looking for someone with a PhD in an area relevant to Humanities or Social Sciences. The Fellow will have the opportunity to develop their own research project as long as it relates to the main research questions of the Centre.