Doctoral Researchers Second Cohort

Photo: Privat/Amann

Gesa Amann

DFG-Funded (Phil)

Gesa Amann holds a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Philosophy from the Universität Hamburg. Her research interests lie in the intersection between collective violence and its ethical implications, complicity, and international law.

Photo: Privat/Bohlen

Christian Bohlen

DFG-Funded (Pol)

Christian Bohlen completed his bachelor's degree in Political Science and History at the Leibniz University of Hanover. For his Master's degree in Political Science, he stayed in Hanover and worked as a student research assistant on the political discourse about constitutional courts. Additionally, he taught Political Science Methods with a focus on the statistical program "R". His research interests concern the area of parliamentary lawmaking. In this context, he concentrates on the role of rational choice institutionalism. Moreover, he is also interested in political representation, with a special emphasis on social media data.

Photo: Privat/Cisell

Isabella Cissell

DFG-Funded (Phil) – November 2023 to March 2025

Isabella Cissell completed a bachelor’s in philosophy at Saint Louis University (Madrid) and a master’s in logic at the Universiteit van Amsterdam, where she studied topics ranging from social philosophy to mathematical logic. Her research interests fall within the fields of ethics, philosophy of language, and philosophical and modal logic. Currently, she is studying the role of economic and power imbalances in discourse that involves disagreement, as well as the formal methods for modeling information and opinion exchange in arguments.

Photo: Privat/Hagemeier

Luchino Hagemeier

UHH-Funded (Phil)

Luchino Hagemeier did his undergraduate studies in Philosophy and Political Science at the Universität Hamburg and the University of Southampton. After graduating from the Universität Hamburg with a Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy, he completed the BPhil in Philosophy at the University of Oxford. His graduate studies at Oxford were funded by the DAAD. His academic interests span all areas of political philosophy. In his doctoral thesis he investigates the potential for a public justification of wealth limits within a Public Reason framework and the distributive demands of Public Reason Liberalism more broadly.

Photo: Privat/Frank

André Frank

DFG-Funded (Econ)
André Frank holds a Master's degree in economics with a focus on quantitative economics from Kiel University. He has also studied economics at Nuremberg University and political science at Science Po Strasbourg. Before coming to Hamburg, he worked at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy on matters of defense economics, sovereign debt composition, and on the Ukraine Support Tracker, a worldwide unique dataset on bilateral aid giving in the context of the Russo-Ukrainian war.

Photo: Privat/Junghans

Lore-Marie Junghans

DFG-Funded (Pol)

Lore-Marie Junghans is a doctoral researcher in Political Theory. She studied Political Science, English Philology, and Philosophy in Göttingen, Hamburg, and St. Andrews. She is interested in political theory, social theory, and the history of political thought. Her research focuses on the democratic role and potential of trade unions in modern democracies. Accordingly, she is concerned with collective decision-making processes outside the political centre, that is, in political arenas beyond parliamentary institutions, for example, and with the democratic implications of the interdependence of politics and economics more generally.

lore-marie.junghans"AT"uni-hamburg.de

Photo: Privat/Mammadli

Shams Mammadli

DFG-Funded (Econ)
Shams Mammadli completed her Bachelor’s degree in Economics at Baku Engineering University. Afterward, she was awarded the DAAD Scholarship and started her studies in the M.Sc. in Economics at Universität Hamburg. For her master’s thesis, she conducted empirical research on the effects of social norms on bribing behavior through an online experiment. She is particularly interested in investigating collective unethical behavior via experimental tools.

Photo: Privat/Merullo

Rossella Merullo

DFG-Funded (Pol)

Rossella Merullo is a doctoral candidate in Political Science. She obtained her undergraduate and graduate degrees in Political Science at La Sapienza University of Rome. She continued her academic career in Berlin, where she completed her second Master's degree in Social Sciences at Humboldt University in 2023. During her time in Berlin, she focused on the study of emotions and affections in relation to migration aspirations, collaborating with various research institutions. Her research interests include the analysis of the affective dimension of collective decision-making processes using natural language processing methods and text analysis.

Photo: Privat/Pollachini

Federico Pollachini

DFG-Funded (Phil)
After achieving his Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy at the University of Trento in 2018, Federico Pollachini pursued his academic goals by obtaining a Master's Degree in Philosophical Sciences at the University of Milan in 2022. He focused on metaphysics, philosophy of language, and logic. This led him to write his master's degree dissertation on counterfactual theories of causality. Currently, his main research interest is modeling collective decision-making instances using the tool of causal models.

Photo: Privat/Riechmann

Felix Riechmann

DFG-Funded (Econ)

Felix Riechmann began his studies of economics at the University of Hamburg in 2017 and graduated with a master's degree in 2023. In addition to his studies, he pursued different secondary occupations in industries such as auditing, law, and financial services. His research focuses on text analysis and natural language processing as tools for quantitative analysis as well as interdisciplinary applications. Current research involves the application of natural language processing methods to the legal domain.

Photo: Privat/Schnelle

Tim Schnelle

DFG-Funded (Econ)
In spring 2020 Tim Schnelle finished his bachelor's program in Political Science and Economics at the University of Göttingen, which also included a six-month stint at the University of Copenhagen. During this time he already gained some teaching experience. He proceeded his academic career in Hamburg, where he completed his M.Sc. in Politics, Economics and Philosophy in early 2023. After his graduation he worked in a research project on informal institutions at the University of Hamburg. His current research interests comprise institutions, game theory and behavioral economics.
tim.schnelle"AT"uni-hamburg.de

Photo: Privat/Thul

Jonathan Thul

DFG-Funded (Phil)

Jonathan Thul is concerned with the application of formal methods to philosophical questions. He holds a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf and a master’s degree in logic from the Universiteit van Amsterdam. In Hamburg, he focuses on questions surrounding deliberation: What social structures are required for deliberation to be fair, and what social structures are required for deliberation to have epistemic benefits? How are these structural requirements related? He is interested in formal and social epistemology, agent-based modeling, social choice theory and political philosophy.

jonathan.thul"AT"uni-hamburg.de

Photo: Privat/Yücel

Ilayda Yücel

DFG-Funded (Pol)
Ilayda Yücel holds a Master's degree in Politics, Economics, and Philosophy from Universität Hamburg. She began her doctoral studies at the Chair of Comparative Politics in 2022. Since the beginning of 2021, she has worked as an editorial assistant at the Journal of Politics. Her research focuses on the political representation of marginalized communities in advanced democracies, as well as immigration and naturalization policymaking processes. Her research aims to contribute to the literature on the link between descriptive and substantive representation and the political and societal consequences of policy decisions.