Our Team
The Centre, housed at Senate House, Bloomsbury, London will officially open in September 2021. Between now and then, we will be recruiting the first generation of early career scientists and scholars.
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.
The Team
The Centre will be directed by Manos Tsakiris and 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
Manos Tsakiris
Director
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 also led the BIAS (Body & Image in Arts & Science, 20216-2021) project, funded by the NOMIS Foundation, at the Warburg Institute, School of Advanced Study, University of London. His research is highly interdisciplinary and focuses on how bodily and feeling states influence our self-awareness and socio-political behaviour.
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.
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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
Mariana von Mohr
Postdoctoral Fellow in Social Neuroscience
Mariana is an experimental psychologist and affective neuroscientist. Her research focuses on how visceral feelings and emotions shape social cognition, including first impressions, self-other distinction, social influence and decision-making in social settings. To investigate this, she employs behavioral, physiological and neuroimaging techniques. She holds an MSc in Developmental Neuroscience and Psychopathology from University College London (UCL) and Yale University, and a PhD in Social Cognitive Neuroscience from University College London (UCL) – funded by CONACyT. At the Centre, Mariana’s research will focus on how emotions and their underlying neurophysiological mechanisms shape political behaviour.
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You can visit Mariana’s website here
Catherine Moez
Fellow in Political Science
Catherine Moez is interested in political discontentment and disengagement across established democracies. Her work at the Centre has involved audio-based experiments to test reactions to emotional expression in political speech, and computational analyses of political texts and audiovisual recordings of politicians. She completed a political science PhD in 2024 with a dissertation focused on measuring differences between populist and mainstream politicians’ communication styles, including comparisons between different ideological factions of the same party in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. She is interested in the quantitative study of emotion and stylistic or rhetorical elements in speech, and looks forward to continuing this observational research on how politicians speak with experiments (or other causal inference strategies) exploring how the public reacts to certain messages and styles.
Interests: Political discontentment and disengagement; Quantitative text analysis; Audio data analysis; Anti-establishment politics
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Andrea Vik
Postdoctoral Fellow in Political Science
Andrea investigates how psychological constructs, emotions, and affect shape political attitudes and behavior, as well as how political communication both influences and leverages these affective dimensions. Methodologically, she specializes in quantitative and experimental approaches. She holds a PhD in Political Science from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and an MSc in Communication Science from the University of Amsterdam. Her research lies at the intersection of political psychology, political communication, and political representation. She is also an open science enthusiast and cares greatly about transparency, reproducibility, and integrity in research practices.You can read more about Andrea on her website: https://andreavik.carrd.co/
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
Could it be you ?
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.
For more details email Manos