Dr. Sebastian Biba
JQYA Fellow 2020
Sabbatical Fellowship Award
Research area: Political Science
Research focus: China’s foreign policy and international relations; China’s international river politics; US-China-Europe triangular relations; responsibility in International Relations.
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Dr. Rikki Dean
JQYA Fellow 2020
Sabbatical Fellowship Award
Research area: Social Sciences
Research focus: His research combines democratic theory, public administration theory and empirical social science to understand issues in participatory governance. His current work is focused on: developing a systemic conception of democracy; evaluating participatory governance projects; understanding the opportunities for democratic innovation represented by new online technologies; and analysing preferences for democratic governance.
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Dr. Daniele Di Mitri
JQYA Fellow 2022
Academy Fellowship Award
Research area: Artificial Intelligence in Education
Research focus: Daniele’s current research focuses on designing responsiblenArtificial Intelligence applications for education and human support. The main advantage of using AI is to provide learners with automated and personalised feedback to improve learning performance and skill mastery.
Dr. Sebastian Eckart
JQYA Fellow 2022
Research area: Physics
Research focus: His research focuses on photo-ionization of single atoms and molecules by strong laser fields with tailored properties. The laser pulses have peak intensities of 10 14 W/cm 2 (very bright) and durations on the order of 10 −15 seconds (very short pulses). Sebastian’s research aims at the investigation of quantum phenomena such as tunneling, interference and entanglement with single atoms and molecules on ultrafast time scales.
Dr. Philipp Erbentraut
JQYA Fellow 2019
Sabbatical Fellowship Award
Research area: Political Sociology
Research focus: political parties, elites and parliaments; comparative politics; history of democracy; political ideas in Germany, Great Britain and USA in the 19th and 20th centuries.
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Dr. Susanne Fehlings
JQYA Fellow 2020
Academy Fellowship Award
Research area: Ethnology
Research focus: The project investigates economic activities of Small and Medium Entrepreneurs (SMEs) such as bazaar and shuttle traders in post-Soviet Eurasia from a grassroots perspective. These activities are usually not or only partly regulated by state institutions and therefore classified as “informal”. They are shaped by social, cultural and political transformations that took and take place since the 1980s. In particular, I focus on the different forms of interethnic exchange between Armenian, Russian, Georgian and Chinese traders and businesspeople.
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Dr. Nadine Flinner
JQYA Fellow 2019
Academy Fellowship Award
Research area: Bioinformatics
Research focus: Understanding the correlation between cell morphology, function and the underlaying molecular features. To link different features to morphology deep learning and quantitative image segmentation are used.
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Dr. Philipp Dominik Keidl
JQYA Fellow 2020
Academy Fellowship Award
Research area: Film and Media Studies
Research focus: Philipp’s current research focuses on fan cultures and their production of nonfiction media. This includes fan-made documentaries, podcasts and blogs on issues such as film and media history, the justice system and the environmental crisis. Moreover, his writing and teaching engages with research-creation as a critical and pedagogical method in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Dr. Kevin Liggieri
JQYA Fellow 2022
Academy Fellowship Award
Research area: History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, Philosophy of Technology, Anthropology of Technology
Research focus: Kevin’s research aims to analyze historically and philosophically the co-constructions of learning and technology. This approach will be used to understand how quantification is used to construct measurable as well as gendered learning subjects, who in turn were to be optimized and controlled through technization.
Dr. Laura McAdam-Otto
JQYA Fellow 2022
Academy Fellowship Award
Research area: European Ethnology / Cultural Anthropology
Research focus: The research project ethnographically examines how the arrival of Sargassum algae is governed along the Caribbean coast, with a focus on Mexico. Laura focuses on how touristified coastal zones transform, how responsibility for anthropogenic climate change is negotiated in everyday situations, and how humans and non-humans shape coastal futures.
Dr. Muriel Moser-Gerber
JQYA Fellow 2019
Sabbatical Fellowship Award
Research area: Ancient History
Research focus: social memories in the Greek cities of Achaea during late Hellenistic times and the early Empire (100 BC to AD 100) and changes under the influence of Rome. Muriel is also interested in political scandals in Roman culture. General topics are the construction and exercise of political power and imperial authority; uses of the past, social memory; taxation, administration and law; epigraphy and prosopography.
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Dr. Daniela Ortiz dos Santos
JQYA Fellow 2022
Sabbatical Fellowship Award
Research area: History of Art, Architecture and Urbanism / Cultural Studies of the Atlantic World
Research focus: Daniela’s research, teaching, and curatorial activities focus on transatlantic architectural history and historiography. The intersection of international organizations and intellectual migration has been useful to an ongoing project that explores Latin America as a category and the architectural historiography of the region during the Cold War era. Entitled ‘UNESCO Making Architecture Culture,’ it explores the different forms of instrumentalization of culture and the arts, as well as the role of this organization in exercising a regional integration movement. This project collaborates with institutions based in Europe and the Americas, in particular with universities in Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro, as well as with archival centers in Rennes (Archives de la critique d’art) and Frankfurt am Main (Deutsches Architekturmuseum).
Dr. Javier Ortiz-Tudela
JQYA Fellow 2022
Academy Fellowship Award
Research area: Psychology and Neuroscience
Research focus: Javier’s field of research is Cognitive Neuroscience where we study how cognitive functions such as Attention, Perception or Language are implemented in the brain. His current project focuses on Predictive Processing and its relation to Episodic Memory. More specifically, he is currently investigating the formation of new memories following unexpected situations and the neural mechanisms by which our experience bias the way we perceive the world. My research stems from Psychology but has direct connections to Physiology, Philosophy and Artificial Intelligence.
Dr. Stanislau Paulau
JQYA Fellow 2022
Academy Fellowship Award
Research area: Theology and Religious Studies
Research focus: Stanislau is a historian of religion and specialist in the field of Eastern Christianity. In his work, he strives to understand religious history as an entangled process and is particularly interested in networks operating across conventional boundaries, be it a certain religious tradition or a geographical region. His current research focuses on the long-term effects of interreligious knowledge exchanges as well as on the role of mobility and mission in the history of global Christianity.
Dr. Magnus Ressel
JQYA Fellow 2020
Academy Fellowship Award
Research area: Early Modern History
Research focus: Magnus’ research focusses on the transatlantic slave trade and its impact the European economic fabric. The concurrent rise of the ‘industrious revolution’ as well as a phenomenon that is best called ‘technological enlightenment’ during the 18th century are studied via the focus on specific key actors in on both sides of the Atlantic who were massively engaged in the transatlantic slave trade – and its undoing.
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Dr. Torben Riehl
JQYA Fellow 2019
Academy Fellowship
Research area: Marine Geobiodiversity Research
Research focus: In his research Torben investigates the origins of the deep-sea biodiversity, especially the evolution of seafloor-inhabiting crustaceans. He is particularly interested in historical and ongoing colonization and distribution-range shifts, the drivers of diversification, and the ecological drivers of coexistence at depths > 3500 m (abyssal and hadal zones). Torben‘s current projects are dedicated to the influence of seafloor topography on biogeography, population differentiation and speciation as well as the effects of habitat heterogeneity on abyssal biodiversity.
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Dr. Marco Tamborini
JQYA Fellow 2020
Academy Fellowship Award
Research area: History and Philosophy of Science
Research focus: His research focuses on the history and philosophy of biology from the 19th century onward. Tamborini is particularly interested in the history and philosophy of evolutionary morphology and paleontology, and in the history and philosophy of technoscience. In his current project, Tamborini radically reconstructs the history and theory of 20th and 21st century morphology as a practice and material circulation of techniques, methods, objects, people, and ideas.
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Prof. Dr. Catherine Whittaker
JQYA Fellow 2022
Sabbatical Fellowship Award
Research area: Social and Cultural Anthropology
Research focus: As an expert on structural violence in the Americas, Whittaker is currently investigating transnational flows of militarized masculinity, with a particular focus on militant Latino groups in Southern California. Taking an intersectional, grassroots perspective, she is analyzing to what extent performances of masculinity are motivated by anti-racist aims and different kinds of nationalism, and how these militant groups are reshaping U.S. gun culture more broadly.