Doctoral Researchers First Cohort

DFG-Funded (Pol) – November 2020 to April 2024

After completing his bachelor's degree in Political Science and Psychology at the Ruprecht-Karls-University Heidelberg, Dominik Austrup proceeded in his academic career with a master's degree in Political Theory at the Goethe-University Frankfurt. He was a visiting student at the New School for Social Research in New York during his master's and a visiting scholar at King's College London during his doctoral studies. In his dissertation, he explores how political realism can help to address contemporary challenges to liberal democracy. In particular, he is concerned with political apathy, fake news and delegitimation, climate mitigation, and elite capture of democratic institutions.

dominik.austrup"AT"uni-hamburg.de 

DFG-Funded (Pol) – November 2020 to December 2024

In 2013 he earned his bachelor’s degree in Philosophy from Aarhus University - that included a one-year stint at the Global and European Studies Institute at the University of Leipzig. Upon gaining working experience as an English teacher in Bogota (Colombia), he began the master’s program in politics, economics, and philosophy at Universität Hamburg from which he graduated in spring 2018. Since then he has been working on his dissertation at Universität Hamburg, while also gaining some teaching experience. His research interests span the fields of deliberative and epistemic theories democracy, preference/belief-formation (in particular adaptive preferences) and ideology critique. He received his PhD in Political Science from the University of Hamburg in March 2024 through the graduate program Collective Decision-Making. His research area is political theory. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as the European Journal of Political Theory, Political Studies, and the Journal of Politics.

DFG-Funded (Econ) – November 2020 to April 2024

He holds a master degree in economics from the Erasmus School of Economics (Rotterdam). He has also studied economics in Passau, Victoria (Canada), and Halle and has completed a master degree in business and economic law. Before joining the DFG Graduate Program ‘Collective Decision-Making’, he has worked as a research and teaching associate at the Chair of Microeconomics (Lydia Mechtenberg) at Uni Hamburg. He investigates how communication and social norms influence collective decisions mainly employing experimental methods.

jan.biermann"AT"uni-hamburg.de 

janbiermann8"AT"web.de (after April 2024)

DFG-Funded (Phil) – April 2021 to June 2024

Suzanne Bloks is postdoctoral researcher on the 'Cohesion and Deliberative Decision-Making' project, funded by the Open Society Foundations, at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She received her PhD in Philosophy from Hamburg University in June 2024 as a member of the graduate program. Suzanne combines political philosophy with insights from game theory, social choice and legal philosophy to address questions in democratic theory writ large. Her research projects and publications can be found on her website: https://suzannebloks.com/

DFG-Funded (Phil) – November 2020 to July 2024

In his PhD Christian works on questions of political legitimacy within a deliberative framework. In particular, he is concerned with the epistemic dimensions of deliberative democracy, its similarities and differences with political realism, and the legitimacy of uncivil disobedience. Before coming to Hamburg, Christian completed two Master’s degrees in Bochum (Ethics – Economics, Law and Politics) and Frankfurt (Philosophy). He had research stays in Beijing and Utrecht.

DFG-Funded (Phil)

Dorela Dëgjoni is a Doctoral Researcher in Philosophy. Before this, she completed her undergraduate studies in Political Sciences and a Master’s of Science in Political Theories at the University of Tirana. Afterward, she followed the Research Training Program in the Social Sciences (MA RTP) at Humboldt University in Berlin. Her research interests are in the intersection of political sciences and political philosophy. Her current research focuses on the effects of vulnerability and relational equality in democratic decision-making.

UHH-Funded (Econ)

Laura Engel completed a bachelor’s degree in Political and Social Studies and Philosophy at the University of Würzburg in 2018, followed by the master’s program Politics, Economics and Philosophy at the University of Hamburg. Since 2021 she is employed in the graduate program on Collective Decision-Making where she works at the intersection of philosophy and microeconomics. In particular, she is interested in questions from social epistemology with a focus on collective deliberative decision-making. In her dissertation, she formally analyses the effects of epistemic dependency on the epistemic quality of discursive decisions.

UHH-Funded (Pol)

Daniel Häuser holds a Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy and History from the University of Heidelberg and a Master’s degree in Philosophy from the Humboldt-University of Berlin. Before joining the Graduate Program, he was a doctoral student at the Free University of  Berlin, Department of Philosophy, and a research assistant at the University of Hamburg,  Department of Political Science. He specializes in political theory, moral and legal philosophy, and the history of political thought. His research focusses on normative questions arising with respect to migration policy.

DFG-Funded (Phil) – November 2020 to October 2024

Carola Hesch obtained both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in philosophy from the University of Mannheim, with economics as a minor. Additionally, she took classes in political science. She spent an exchange semester at the University of Leiden where she attended courses from the PPE program. Before starting her doctorate, she worked in science communications and launched a podcast. Her doctoral dissertation, which addresses the problem of political legitimacy, is located at the intersection of political philosophy, legal theory, and constitutional economics. In her thesis, she develops a contractarian legitimacy criterion for institutions which can be applied to all levels of a legal order.

carola.hesch"AT"uni-hamburg.de 

DFG-Funded (Phil) – November 2020 to April 2024

Julia studied philosophy, political science and business administration in Berlin, Hamburg and Cartagena de Indias (Colombia). In 2024 she completed her PhD in philosophy with a focus on democratic theory. Her dissertation "Lottocracy as Democracy - Political Equality, Representation and Public Control without Elections?" examines whether lottocracy (a political system based on the random allocation of political offices to all citizens by lottery) would be a democratic form of government or an undemocratic alternative to electoral democracy. During her PhD, Julia spent three months as a research student at Stanford University and subsequently worked with the Deliberative Democracy Lab and the Berlin-based project 'Hallo Bundestag' on random citizen participation. Since completing her PhD, Julia has been working for the City of Hamburg as a policy advisor for urban planning.

UHH-Funded (Econ) – April 2021 to April 2024

Dylan completed his bachelor’s degree in International Political Economy at Colorado College, during which he interned for the United States Senate Judiciary Committee and studied abroad in Lüneburg. Upon completion of his bachelor’s, he undertook short research stays in Pristina, Kosovo and in Göttingen before enrolling in Uni Hamburg’s M.Sc. program in Politics, Economics, and Philosophy, which he finished in early 2021. His research interests include property rights, personal data, and endogenous institutions.

johnson.dylan"AT"protonmail.ch (for future reference)

DFG-Funded (Econ) – November 2020 to April 2024

Juliane Koch finished her doctoral studies in in economics in August 2024. Since September 2024, she is working as a post-doctoral researcher at Lund University (Sweden) and continues to work at the intersection of behavioral and environmental economics. She is particularly interested in collective action problems with a non-exclusive focus on environmental topics. For instance, in her post-doc, she will also be researching about how we can sustainably govern natural resources such as water. On a broader specturm, her research further focuses on topics such as inequality, fairness perceptions and social norms. Her experimental data is collected online, in the lab as well as in the field, also in Non-WEIRD environments. Find her website here: https://sites.google.com/view/juliane-koch

DFG-Funded (Pol) – November 2020 to April 2024

In her PhD thesis, Jasmin studied how populist parties in office challenge the rule of law and the way in which courts respond to these threats. Her research combined cross-country analyses with in-depth case studies focused on Austria. For the case studies, she employed computational text analysis and conducted survey experiments. She was also  involved in a research project investigating judicial attitudes among populist and non-populist citizens. Passionate about making social science research more accessible to the public, after her PhD Jasmin worked as a data journalist and visual coder at Der Spiegel, one of Germany's largest news magazines. She also freelanced on small data visualization projects, moderated events, and participated in panel discussions. 

On 5 August 2025 Jasmin died in a tragic accident in the mountains.

 

DFG-Funded (Econ) – January 2022 to January 2024

Timo started his academic career at the University of Hamburg in 2012 by studying Mathematics and stayed ever since. He holds a B.Sc. and M.Sc. degree in Economics and is / was involved in numerous institutions within the UHH. His research is focused on ethical behavior in groups and how social norms and reputational concerns may have an impact on an individual’s behavior. Freshly acquired programming skills enable the setup and implementation of somewhat complex interactive online experiments featuring video chats.
timo.promann"AT"uni-hamburg.de

DFG-Funded (Econ) – November 2020 to September 2024

He has been a doctoral student in economics and a research associate in economics and philosophy at the Universität Hamburg since 2019. Before, he graduated with a bachelor degree in economics and a master degree in public economics, law and politics from the Leuphana University of Lüneburg. His research is concerned with welfare economics, social choice theory, and practical philosophy. Topics include the formal analysis of aggregation procedures, positional ranking rules, facts and norms in aggregation, interpersonal utility comparisons, welfarism, utilitarianism, consequentialism and intrinsic value. He graduated with a PhD in economics in May 2024. Find his website here: https://sites.google.com/view/robert-raschka

robert.raschka"AT"uni-hamburg.de 

DFG-Funded (Phil) – November 2020 to January 2024

Filippo Riscica Lizzio graduated in Philosophy at the universities of Catania (BA cum laude) and Bologna (MA cum laude). While at the University of Bologna, he spent visiting periods at the University of Helsinki and at the University of Nottingham. After these experiences, he attended the Logic Year Program at the ILLC, University of Amsterdam. He works in social epistemology (epistemology of groups) and formal epistemology (agent-based models of opinion dynamics). Leaving the Graduate Program “Collective Decision-Making” on 31 January 2024, he works from February 2024 as a Research Fellow at the University of Bologna.

UHH-Funded (Pol) – May 2021 to July 2024

She double majored in Political Science and International Relations and Translation and Interpreting at Yeditepe University in Istanbul. She holds an MSc in Politics, Economics, and Philosophy from Universität Hamburg. During her Master’s, she worked as research assistant for the Chair of Comparative Politics and was involved in a project on maternity leave impact on women’s career outcomes in academia. In her master thesis, she examined the effects of political ideology on governments’ policy responses to the coronavirus crisis. She is specifically interested in the effect of political representation on stringent policies towards different crises.

zeynep.ceren.topac"AT"uni-hamburg.de 

 

DFG-Funded (Econ) – November 2020 to August 2024

Arna is a Ph.D. candidate in Economics, supervised by Gerd Muehlheusser (Econ) and Judith Simon (Ethics in IT). Her research uses experiments to study the intersection of behavioral economics and technology ethics, in particular how emerging technologies can lead to discrimination in the labor market and criminal justice system. She was a visiting scholar at Columbia University’s Data Science Institute in Spring 2023 and at Columbia Law School in Spring 2024. She is also a Ph.D. Fellow in the Privacy Research Group at New York University (Information Law Institute). Prior to her graduate studies, Arna worked at a consulting firm in Berlin where she advised international companies and government institutions on large-scale digital transformations. She holds an M.Sc. in Business Economics from the Humboldt University of Berlin and a B.Sc. in Economics from the University of Bayreuth. Arna will be on the 2024/25 job market. Find her website here: www.arnawoemmel.com