About us

Starting from October 1, 2024, Dr. Alexandra Scacco will be a new professor of "Comparative Political Science: Migration, Health, and Conflict in the Global South" at the Department of Social Sciences of the Faculty of Business, Economics and Social Sciences at the University of Hamburg, in collaboration with the WZB Berlin Social Science Center.

Alex Scacco studied International Relations and Public Policy at the London School of Economics and Princeton University. She earned her Ph.D. in Political Science 2010 from Columbia University with a dissertation on participation in communal violence in Nigeria. After her doctorate, she worked as a Prize Research Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford, before serving as an Assistant Professor of Politics at New York University. Since 2017, she has been a Senior Research Fellow at the WZB Berlin, where she has also been the Deputy Director of the Institutions and Political Inequality Unit since 2021. Her research uses field-based observational and experimental methods to study the causes and consequences of individual decision-making in conditions of extreme risk, with a substantive focus on political violence, post-conflict reconciliation, intergroup relations and irregular migration.