Research School in Computational Social Science

Alexandra is a PhD Student in Analytical Sociology at the Institute for Analytical Sociology, Linköping University, Sweden. In her past work, she has used a variety of methodological approaches — ranging from natural language processing to network analysis — to study attention dynamics in parliaments, the digital development of nations, as well as gender segregation in the STEM disciplines. In her PhD, she plans to extend and build on this existing work.

Anastasia Menshikova is a PhD student at the Institute for Analytical Sociology, Linköping University, Sweden. Her research focuses on discovering and explaining inequalities, biases, and discriminatory practices using textual digital traces. Besides that, she is interested in social and cultural change - how changes in individual opinions, beliefs and meanings lead to shifts at a collective level. She is generally curious about using computational text analysis to answer sociological questions.

Asmaa Abdelkhalek is a PhD student and a research Assistant at the Department of Political Science, Cairo University, Egypt. She is also a researcher at InterRegional for Strategic Analysis, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Her research is about the integration of quantitative and qualitative research in political science, with a particular focus on the intersection between international relations and public opinion. She is currently working on a project that examines the impact of misinformation and fake news, with a particular emphasis on the integration of machine learning applications to study these topics.

Julia Gottstein is a doctoral student at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University. Her dissertation project explores dark participation and the perception of its moderation in Czech media. She uses computational methods to examine mediated interactions in the social media comments section of news media outlets.

Diletta Goglia is a doctoral student at Uppsala University. Her work in the "UU Information Laboratory research group" focuses on developing computational methods to model and explain social behavior of people in online communication. Her current project is analyzing users’ roles in conversational data from Online Social Networks, aiming at identifying, modelling and understanding actors’ behavioral patterns in online discussions, by combining structural properties of graphs with social theories. Previously, she collaborated with the “HumMingBird - Horizon 2020 EU” project, working on Machine Learning and Big Data Science to study and predict cross-border human migration using Social Big Data from Facebook.

Emelie Karlsson is a PhD student in political science at Uppsala University. She is a part of a research project focusing on "AI and political communication", and her dissertation project focuses on coordinated inauthentic behavior and information campaigns on social media platforms and their social and political implications using mixed methods - including experimental and computational approaches.

Hendrik Erz is a PhD student at the Institute for Analytical Sociology. With a background in history, political science, and sociology, he specializes in the policymaking process in the U.S. Congress. Methodologically, he focuses on the use of large language models (LLMs) for text analysis. He is also interested in the ethics and political implications of artificial intelligence more broadly.

Jan Sodoge is a Ph.D. student at the Helmholtz-Centre for Environmental Research (Leipzig, Germany) and the University of Potsdam. Jan has a background in geography, system science, and computational social science. In his doctoral research, he investigates the socio-economic impacts of droughts and how social systems interact and react to water scarcity. To do this, he leverages natural language processing to extract the impacts of drought from newspaper articles.

Jeongho Choi is pursuing a Ph.D. in Political science from the University of Iowa, USA. He received BA and MA in Political Science from Kyung Hee University, South Korea. His research interests include comparative politics and political methodology, with particular focuses on populism, public opinion, text analysis, and machine learning.

Katarina Sandberg is a PhD student at the Division of Political Science and the Centre for Local Government Studies at Linköping University. Her research is centered around the consequences of inter-municipal cooperation, which entails the establishment of a new governmental entity assuming responsibility for a specific policy domain across multiple municipalities.

Maarja is a doctoral researcher at University of Neuchâtel (Switzerland) within a project on narratives of crisis and their influence on migration policies. Her background is in sociology and migration studies. Her research interests include migration governance, migration policy formation, securitisation of migration, citizenship, and text-as-data methods.

Maël Lecoursonnais is a PhD student at the Institute for Analytical Sociology. His research interests span spatial inequalities, causal inference, and applied machine learning. His current project investigates the consequences of spatial inequalities on life-course outcomes such as education or income, using causally-oriented methods and/or machine learning algorithms.

Marcel Kappes is PhD student at the Graduate School of Economic and Social Sciences at the University of Mannheim. In his empirical research, he uses quantitative-, network-, and computational methods to investigate the consequences of issue changes in social movement organizations and immigrants’ job careers in the German labor market.

Matthew Koo is a doctoral student at Yale’s Department of Political Science. His substantive research interests span authoritarian politics, state building, and bureaucracies. He holds an MA from the University of Chicago, and a joint BA from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and National University of Singapore.

Sophie is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Government at Uppsala University, Sweden. She researches the consequences of femonationalism and selective preference formation both in digital communication environments and offline. This entails citizens’ responses to political messages that mix liberal and illiberal values, such as gender politics with populist ideas. In her dissertation work, she combines experiments and computational social science methods. As a founder of the PolMethods group at her department and as a teacher, Sophie is keenly interested in the advancement of computational methods both for research and as a teaching subject.

Stian Rødven-Eide is a doctoral researcher at Språkbanken Text, a language technology research unit at the University of Gothenburg. His thesis work on semantic analyses of the Swedish parliamentary debates is currently focused on automatically detecting and classifying argumentation. Seeing NLP as a means, rather than an end in itself, Stian is particularly interested in technological research that can answer questions of social and political nature, preferably to the benefit of democracy

Susanne Böller is a PhD student in sociology at the University of Bonn. Her research examines the emergence of social and symbolic boundaries among adolescents. As part of the Emmy Noether group "Sorting Decisions and Peer Processes in Schools" (SPINS) she analyses how school principals' decisions regarding classroom placements affect peer relations at secondary schools.

Zeyang Huang is a PhD student in the Media and Information Technology division at Linköping University. She is interested in creating new visual analytics interfaces with explainable AI to explore large-scale network and text data. Her current research focuses on visualization for social network analysis and stance mining.

Matthias Kuppler is a PhD student in sociology at the University of Siegen, Germany. His research combines network analysis and agent-based modeling to explain the emergence of status hierarchies in social fields. In his current work, he examines the formation of inequalities in the global literary field.

Zhuojun Gu is a PhD student at the Department of Psychology at Lund University in Sweden. His interest is in the intersection between computational psychology and clinical psychology, especially depression and anxiety. His current research focuses on using computational methods, e.g., large language models, to investigate human-centered, clinically aligned psychometric research. His work is trying to extend the horizons of more accurate diagnosis of mental disorders as well as precise treatment prediction for mental health.