Assistant Professor (Tenure-Track), Department of Political Science, Simon Fraser University,

Ex-Officio Chair – Tijana Karic

Dr. Tijana Karić holds a PhD in Social Psychology from the University of Novi Sad, Serbia. She works as a research fellow at the Institute of Criminological and Sociological Research in Belgrade, Serbia, and since October 2021, she is a Humboldt research fellow at the Philipps University Marburg, Germany. In her research, Tijana applies qualitative as well as quantitative methods to explore intergroup relations.

Her main research focus is on intergroup relations in post-conflict societies, with regard to identity processes. The case study she explores primarily is Bosnia and Herzegovina. Additionally, she is interested in prejudice and discrimination as well as challenges of integration of marginalized groups. Lately, she has put more focus on evidence-based policymaking, i.e., creating evidence for meaningful social change.

Committee Chair - Dr. Myrto Pantazi

Dr. Myrto Pantazi holds a PhD in Social Psychology from the Université libre de Bruxelles, where she is currently working as a post-doctoral researcher. Myrto previously held post-doctoral positions at the University of Cambridge and the Oxford Internet Institute. She also worked for one year as a Policy Analyst at the Joint Research Center of the European Commission where she was providing behavioural insights for policy-making.

Myrto’s research interests broadly cover the psychology of beliefs. Combining experimental and survey methodology she mainly studies how people validate information, and why they believe in misinformation. She is also interested in conspiracy beliefs and their relationship to socio-political attitudes, and she has conducted research on social influence in public opinion as well as on sustainable investment decisions.

Mentorship Program - Dr. Slieman Halabi

Dr Slieman Halabi studied did his masters in cognitive psychology at Tel Aviv University and his PhD in social psychology at the Friedrich Schiller University and The International Max Planck Research School on Adapting Behavior in a Fundamentally Uncertain World in Jena. He works as a post-doc at the University of Wuppertal in Germany. His research interest revolves around the influence of our social identities on interactions with ingroup and outgroup members. His PhD thesis was concerned with in-between members who straddle the group memberships in group that are immersed in an intergroup conflict, and how in-between groups can be seen as a threat to intergroup boundaries but also how they navigate their intergroup orientations within this set of complex relations. Recently, Slieman has been conducting research that looks at the misrecognition of minority group members (in means of identity denial and other “micro-aggressions”) and it affects their relationship with the majority society. He also examines the ways in which minority members’ responses to such experience can be constructively dealt with by majority group members and thus tests interventions to reduce defensiveness to criticism against micro-aggressions. Besides, Slieman is interested in the role language and linguistic styles (e.g., accent) in relation within and across social groups.

Professional Development - Dr. Fabian Neuner

Dr. Neuner is an Assistant Professor in the School of Politics and Global Studies at Arizona State University. He received his PhD in Political Science from the University of Michigan in 2018. His research focuses on political psychology, political behavior, and public opinion, both in the U.S. and in comparative contexts. In his current research, he is interested in understanding the cognitive and affective drivers of attitude polarization, the mechanisms underlying media effects such as priming and framing, and citizens’ responsiveness to populist appeals.

ECC Newsletter - Jessica Gale

Jessica Gale is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand and KU Leuven in Belgium, on a project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. She is also a Senior Researcher at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, in collaboration with the National Center of Competence in Research – The Migration-Mobility Nexus. She holds a PhD in Social Psychology from the Universities of Lausanne and Geneva, an MSc in Psychology from the same institution, a BEd from Queen’s University, and a BA in Psychology from Trent University. Adopting experimental and multilevel methodologies, her research centres on cultural diversity, immigration, and social justice from an intergroup relations perspective.

ECC Blog & Web Resources - Dr. Islam Borinca

Dr. Islam Borinca is a Lecturer/Asst Professor in the School of Psychology, University College Dublin. He obtained his doctorate degree in Social Psychology from the Universities of Geneva and Lausanne as a PhD Scholarship Excellence Recipient on an individual PhD project sponsored by the Swiss Federal Commission for Scholarships for Foreign Students. Afterward, he worked as a teaching/research assistant at the Center Emile Bernheim, Université Libre de Bruxelles (Brussels). Following that, he conducted his postdoctoral research at the University of Limerick (Ireland). His research focuses on intergroup relations, specifically examining help, contact, and group norms, with an emphasis on emotions, empathy, dehumanization, meta-dehumanization, intergroup apologies, prejudice, and discrimination in hostile and non-hostile contexts. He also investigates gender norms, gender roles, and behaviors. In addition, his research examines intragroup processes in regards to threats, expectations, and health.

Professional Development - Ruri Takizawa

Ruri Takizawa is a PhD Candidate in Social Psychology at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. She completed her BSc in Psychology at Bielefeld University (Germany) and her MSc in Social Cognition at University College London (England).

In her research, Ruri focuses on the glass cliff phenomenon using a mix of experimental, archival, and survey data. She investigates what kind of leadership is demanded in different types of crises, which expectations arise when underrepresented group members (i.e., women and ethnic, racial, and immigration minority group members) occupy leadership roles in politics and organizations, and how these candidates are evaluated.

ECC Blog & Web Resources – Daniel Valdenegro

Daniel majored in Psychology (Licentiate) from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. He worked work for several years in the Social Psychology Lab under the guide of Prof. Roberto Gonzalez and Prof. Jorge Manzi. After working there, he applied to a PGR (post graduate researchers) in Computational Social Science in the University of Leeds with Dr. Viktoria Spaiser and Dr. Richard Mann as supervisors, where he has been working on NLP (Natural Language Processing) and AI (Artificial Intelligence) for Language projects linked to social media and social movements.

Broadly speaking, he is interested in the use of “big data” from digital sources -such as social media, IoT or just general digital footprint- to model human behavior. My current PhD project attempts to use the public digital footprint on social media of populations that are currently undergoing periods of social unrest to extract their general emotional patterns, all of this with the goal to build a predictive model of activism based on these parameters.

ECC Newsletter – Felipe Vilanova

Felipe received his BA in Psychology from the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul. He earned his MSc degree and is a PhD Student at the Psychology Graduate Program of the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS), advisored by Dr. Angelo Brandelli Costa (PUCRS, Brazil). He is the Technical Editor of the Revista Argentina de Ciencias del Comportamiento and Managing Editor of the journal Trends in Psychology. He is also the Moderator of the global open-science preprint platform PsyarXiv. The current main research themes are authoritarianism, social dominance and corruption.

Mentorship Program – Rongbo Jin

Rongbo Jin is a PhD student in political science at the University of Arizona in the US. He mainly focuses on political psychology, political behavior, and public opinion with the context of American politics. His ongoing projects investigate the nature and effects of affective polarization and its association with partisanship and political ideology. Methodologically, he uses survey experiments, text analysis, item response theory, structural equation model and other quantitative methods. He was the manager for Arizona Policy Lab at the University of Arizona which is dedicated to addressing pressing social problems based on cutting edge scientific practices and cross-disciplinary collaborations.