I am a post-doctoral researcher at both the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the United States and the University of Kaiserslautern-Landau (RPTU) in Germany. I study the interactions between our moral minds and media (both news media and social media) on political polarization and conflict. 

As a political psychologist, I have training in social psychology but regularly conduct interdisciplinary research with communication scholars, computer scientists, political scientists, and anthropologists. Using primarily experimental/quantitative methods, I examine how understandings of morality (especially connected to victimhood) and what we see in the media often feed off one another to amplify affective polarization and partisan animosity. I am also beginning to study how AI can both increase and decrease political polarization and conflict. I leverage these findings to inform how we develop effective (media and/or AI) interventions to build understanding and bridge divides. 

I am currently a visiting scholar at the University of Oxford in the Department of Experimental Psychology and am a research affiliate at the Center for Conflict and Cooperation at New York University. In September 2025 I will begin a DFG Walter Benjamin fellowship at the University of Oxford in the Department of Experimental Psychology. 

Email: [email protected]