I am a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University where I work with Prof. Naomi Oreskes and a Research Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies SOCRATES at the Leibniz Universität Hannover. I am funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation Postdoc Mobility fellowship that was awarded to me for the project “Scientific and public perceptions of the political terrain of climate change science”. I received my PhD in environmental psychology from ETH Zürich, with a thesis titled: "The Role of Trust, Confidence and Expert Credibility for Climate Change Mitigation".
I use qualitative and quantitative social science methods to answer the following questions:
- How can we spark individual and collective action on climate change and what structural changes are needed to foster such behavioral responses?
- What are the determinants of trust in science in different national contexts and how do they affect normative perceptions of the role of science in policymaking?
- How have political, cultural, and economic power structures shaped and affected research on climate change and how are they preventing climate change mitigation?
I am currently leading a Many Labs study on Trust in Science and Science-Related Populism (TISP), which assesses the prevalence and correlates of trust in science and science-related populism, as well as climate change-related attitudes, with 238 co-authors in 67 countries on all inhabited continents.
I believe that answering these questions requires interdisciplinary collaborations, which is why I am currently collaborating with historians and philosophers of science, computational social scientists, science communication scholars as well as climate scientists.
