Postdoctoral Fellows
Amber Hye-Yon Lee received a joint PhD in Communication and Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania. She is a postdoctoral fellow at Ryerson University with the Consortium on Electoral Democracy (C-Dem). Her research interests are in public opinion, political psychology, and political communication, with a focus on partisan polarization and social identity.
Matthew Simonson earned his Ph.D. in Network Science from Northeastern University. His research combines qualitative interviews in conflict-affected countries with surveys on war and protest, experiments in prejudice-reduction, and methodological work on causal inferences in networks. His book project, “Save a Neighbor, Shoot a Stranger,” seeks to understand the role of cross-group social ties in both rescue and betrayal during social unrest, genocide, and civil war. His work has been supported by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the U.S. Department of Defense, and the Post-Conflict Research Center in Sarajevo.
Şule Yaylacı received her PhD from the University of British Columbia. She studies armed conflict, race and ethnicity, and participatory democracy. She has focused on how war transforms trust relations, conducting fieldwork in Turkey and Peru. Her work is supported by a Banting Fellowship from the government of Canada.
Anna Zhang received her PhD from Stanford University. She studies how states use internal migration as a strategy to contain ethnic insurgency. She is interested in the interplay of international and domestic politics and how that affects ethnic policies. Her research draws on archival data, ethnographic fieldwork, and interviews from China.
Graduate Affiliates
Jason Hartwig is a current PhD student in Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on armed conflict, intervention, identity, and state-building with an emphasis on micro-foundations of conflict and governance. Previously, Jason served as a combat arms officer in the U.S. Army and in civilian security sector reform positions with extensive fieldwork in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia.
Catalina Mica Udani is a current PhD student in Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests include conflict, immigration, and human rights. She studies the effect of ethnic and religious identities on mass collective action and how international conflict affects individual domestic outcomes and social identities, with a focus on nondemocratic states in the global south.
Lukas Reinhardt is a PhD student in Economics at the University of Cologne focusing on behavioral economics and political psychology. He studies the determinants of social identity and social cohesion and their interrelations with autonomy, competition, and conflict. Furthermore, he explores ways to strengthen global identity and promote international cooperation.