Senior Research Fellows

With our Senior Fellows program, we intend to bring additional expertise and international experience to Konstanz. Therefore, our Senior Fellows are researchers from outside the University of Konstanz with an established track record and international visibility, as well as a keen interest in the Cluster’s concepts and lines of research. They usually come to Konstanz for a stay of two to six months. Senior Fellows are full members of the Cluster and participate in our activities.

David Garcia

David Garcia is professor for Social and Behavioural Data Science at the University of Konstanz since 2022 and Faculty Member of the "Complexity Science Hub Vienna". He is a member of the Extended Directorate of the Centre for Human | Data | Society at the University of Konstanz since October 2022. David studied Computer Engineering and Computer Science at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and ETH Zürich, where he obtained his habilitation in Computational Social Sciences in 2018 (thesis: Understanding Emotions and Social Interactions in the Digital Society). He has expert knowledge in Computational Social Science investigating human behavior through digital traces with methods from complexity science. Analyzing big social data by using computational modeling, he aims to understand the impact of line media and social media networks on individuals and society (e.g. inequalities, data privacy).

Learn more about David here.

Mazen Hassan

Mazen Hassan is a Professor of Comparative Politics at Cairo University, Egypt. He is interested in explaining political and socio-economic behaviour in the Middle East using experimental and survey methodology. His research topics include social norms, pro-social behaviour, parliamentary politics, electoral and party systems. His research project on the cluster focuses on the underrepresentation of constituents from underprivileged socio-economic background in the legislative budgeting process.

He has a PhD degree in politics from Oxford University, a Master’s degree from Warwick University (UK), and a BSc degree from Cairo University. He has been previously a visiting professor at Harvard Kennedy School, Oxford University’s Centre for the Study of African Economies, MIT’s Centre for International Studies, and Hamburg University. For two years (2018-2020), he has been the director of the Centre for Political Research at Cairo University. 

Learn more about Mazen here.

Herbert Kitschelt

Herbert Kitschelt is a Professor of Comparative Politics at Duke University, North Carolina, USA. He has published on political preference formation, party organization, party competition and voter alignments in Western Europe, Post-communist Eastern Europe, and Latin America, and on clientelistic linkage mechanisms in global comparison. He is particularly interested in the interface between electoral politics and political economy. He is currently completing a 90-country expert survey to explore the distribution of clientelistic and programmatic party competition around the world. A major subject of the resulting investigations will concern the relationship between political linkage mechanisms, state capacity building, and economic inequality.

He has a PhD degree in sociology from the University of Bielefeld, Germany, and has mostly taught at Duke University (1984-now), with brief stints of guest/visiting teaching at the University of California, Santa Cruz and San Diego, Stanford, and the University of Notre Dame in the first half of the 1980s, as well as a four-year joint appoint with Duke teaching at Humboldt University Berlin, Chair of Comparative Politics (1993-7). He also has intermittently taught at Central European University, then Budapest (2006-14).

Learn more about Herbert here.

Anna Manzoni

Anna Manzoni is Professor of Sociology at North Carolina State University. Her current research interests include intergenerational support, youth transition to adulthood, inequalities in college access and labor market returns, and social mobility more broadly. Her work has been published in Social Forces, Sociological Methodology, PLOS one, Socius, Advances in Life Course Research, among other journals.

Learn more about Anna here.

Steffen Schindler

Steffen Schindler is Professor of Sociology with Focus on Education and Work in the Life Course at the University of Bamberg. He is the scientific head of the pillar “Social Inequality and Educational Decisions Across the Life Course” in the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS). His research interests include social mobility and social inequalities in education and the labor market. He studied Political Science, Sociology and Public Law and holds a PhD in Social Sciences from the University of Mannheim.

Learn more about Steffen here.

Meghan Sumner

Meghan Sumner is Associate Professor of Phonetics at Stanford University. Her work investigates sound patterns in languages, their variation, and patterns of use. She examines the social meanings people attach to these patterns and how this social information affects attention, perception, recognition, memory, and comprehension. Her general focus is on understanding the mechanisms and representations that underlie spoken language understanding and how they interact across different listener and speaker populations in a social and dynamic world.

Find out more about Meghan here.