PhD Alumni

Guy Aitchison

 

Guy is a Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Studies at Loughborough University. Prior to this, he was a Teaching Fellow in Political Philosophy in the Philosophy department of King’s College London, a Government of Ireland postdoctoral fellow at University College Dublin (2016 - 2018) and a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute (2015 - 2016).
 

Ivica Petrikova

“I am currently a Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Royal Holloway University of London. I am doing research on various issues - food security governance, economic inequality, and the link between populism and development aid. I teach Politics of Development and other development-related courses for both UG and PG.”

Markus Kollberg 

Markus Kollberg is a Post-Doctoral Researcher at Humboldt University Berlin. He received his PhD from University College London (UCL) in 2023. During his PhD, he was a visiting researcher at Yale University and the University of Vienna. Previously, Markus has worked as a freelance journalist for various media outlets covering German, British and International Politics. He regularly organises and teaches civic education workshops in Germany and Eastern Europe.

Sigrid Weber

Sigrid Weber is an Assistant Professor in International Relations at IE University Madrid, Spain (2025-). She completed her PhD in Political Science in 2023 at University College London with Professor Nils Metternich and Professor Alexandra Hartman, investigating the dynamics of violence and displacement during civil wars. After her PhD, Sigrid was a postdoctoral fellow at the Immigration Policy Lab at Stanford University (2023-2025), working on improving livelihoods for refugees in developing countries. Her research now at IE University focuses on quantitative micro-level conflict research and forced migration studies in collaboration with different humanitarian and development organisations. She holds a master’s degree in Security Studies from University College London and a bachelor’s degree in Political Science and Public Administration from the University of Konstanz. 

Sofia Collignon

Dr Sofia Collignon is currently a lecturer in Royal Holloway, University of London and an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Strathclyde. She obtained her PhD from the Department of Political Science, University College London (January 2017). Before that, she was awarded an MSc in Political Economy from the University of Essex and a BA in International Relations from ITESO (Mexico).

Prior to joining Royal Holloway, Sofia was a postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Strathclyde, working as part of the team behind the ESCR-funded Representative Audit of Britain project, part of Parliamentary Candidates UK. During that time, she was also part of the Constitution Unit team. Sofia’s main research interests include: a) the study of candidates, elections and parties, b) harassment and intimidation of candidates and c) framing contests in the formation of public opinion. Her research is comparative in nature and she uses quantitative methods. She has published in journals such as Party Politics, West European Politics and Electoral Studies.

Francisco da Costa Marques 

“After finishing my PhD in 2013 I returned to my position in the Brazilian federal civil service. First I took a post as an aide to the Presidential Legislative Liaison Office. There I had the chance to work with the very topic of my thesis - the relationship between the executive and the legislative branches. This was a very intense four-year period, in which I learned a great deal about the policy making process. On the top of that, the country entered a period of political turmoil, social unrest and economic crisis, which seems will not end any time soon.

In 2017 I took a job at the Minister of Education, working with Human Rights Education and Diversity. Having a direct involvement with HRE policy was a particularly enriching and challenging experience, given the urgency the issue deserves and the opposition it unfortunately faces even within the government. Nowadays, since the beginning of 2019, I am working in the Bolsa Família, a national conditional cash transfer program. The program aims to reduce short-term poverty by monthly hand-outs and to break intergenerational cycles of poverty by mandating health and education requirements.

Besides my career in the civil service, I have been trying to keep in touch with the academia, as an independent researcher. In September 2018 I had a chapter of my PhD thesis published in one of the leading interdisciplinary journals in the field of the social sciences in Brazil, the Revista Brasileira de Ciências Sociais.”

Lotte Hargrave 

Lotte Hargrave joined the Department of Politics at the University of Manchester as a Lecturer in Quantitative Political Science in August 2023. In her research, she uses innovative quantitative designs to study what voters want, how politicians act, and the sources and consequences of bias in our political systems. 

Before joining Manchester, Lotte was the Head of Data Science at the public opinion consultancy Deltapoll. Her work at Deltapoll involved managing and fielding surveys for clients, carrying out research into British politics and public opinion, delivering quantitative presentations and reports, and data analysis and visualisations of all political trackers including Westminster vote intention, economic competence, and leadership approval ratings.

Lotte completed her PhD at UCL in 2022. In her thesis, supervised by Professor Meg Russell, Dr Jack Blumenau and Professor Jennifer Hudson, she examined the dynamic influence of gender stereotypes on politicians’ behaviour and voter attitudes. Her thesis was awarded the 2023 SPP’s “Best Thesis Award”, in addition to the 2023 PSA McDougall Trust Prize for the best dissertations in elections, electoral systems, and representation. 

Orly Siow

“I am a Lecturer in the Politics of Gender at Newcastle University. My PhD at UCL analysed the combined effects of political candidates’ race and gender on press coverage of their campaigns in the US and UK. The thesis was awarded SPP’s 2019 Best PhD Dissertation Prize as well as the prestigious 2019 Joni Lovenduski Prize. More widely, I use intersectionality as a theoretical framework to investigate how women’s political representation varies along racial, religious, class and partisan lines. Currently, I am analysing minority women’s substantive representation in the UK Parliament. I also consult on the advancement of women’s interests through civil society and development programming, and have been funded by UNESCO, Australian Aid, Developmental Leadership Program and Pacific Leadership Program.”

Matia Vannoni

Matia Vannoni is a Lecturer in Public Policy in the Department of Political Economy, King’s College London. From November 2016 to August 2018, Matia was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Innocenzo Gasparini Institute for Economic Research (IGIER), Bocconi University, where he worked on a project which used advanced text analysis (based on computational linguistics) to study delegation, legislative complexity and economic growth.

Matia completed his PhD at UCL (awarded in February 2017). He also holds a Bachelor’s and Master’s Degree in Political Science from the University of Trento and an MRes from the LSE.

Andreas Juon

Andreas Juon completed his PhD in 2020 at University College London under the supervision of Prof. Kristin M. Bakke and Associate Prof. Nils W. Metternich. In his dissertation, he analyzes the consequences of power-sharing arrangements for ethnic conflict. He argues that these should be understood in a triple-disaggregated manner, considering different institutional types of power-sharing, types of ethnic groups, and time horizons. The analysis relies on a new global dataset of constitutional power-sharing for 1945-2018, which he has collected and used in several published articles on the exclusion of micro-minorities and democratization. In several working papers, he further extends his research on the trade-offs entailed by attempts to institutionalize inter-ethnic peace. In this vein, he investigates the consequences of territorial autonomy both for civil and communal violence, focusing on the implications of how administrative boundaries are drawn. He currently works as a postdoc in Prof. Lars-Erik Cederman’s International Conflict Research group at ETH Zurich, having obtained funding from the ETH Fellows program. In this ongoing project, he extends his PhD research by systematically examining ethnic majority mobilization against minority accommodation since the end of the Cold War. An overview on Andreas’ research program and its background has previously appeared on ETH news. More details can be found on his webpage.

Michael Jacobs

Michael Jacobs is a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Public Policy Group, ETH Zurich, where he works on projects aiming to improve the quality of online discourse. His PhD, which he completed at University College London (UCL) in 2025, examined the effectiveness of (disruptive vs non-disruptive) protest at shifting public discourse and public opinion in the protesters preferred direction. Previously, Michael has worked as a policy advisor at the UK Treasury.

Kasim Khorasanee

 

Kasim Khorasanee is a Teaching Associate in Philosophy at the University of Nottingham (2022-present). He completed his PhD in Political Theory at University College London investigating the relationship between open-mindedness and theories of deliberative democracy (2022). He holds a bachelor’s degree in Social & Political Sciences and an MPhil in International Relations, both from the University of Cambridge, and is a qualified solicitor. Kasim teaches a variety of courses ranging from reasoning, argument, and logic to history of political thought. His research crosses a range of political theory, applied ethics, and pedagogy. Most recently he has published on the ethics of spoofing in high frequency trading markets and the concept of open-mindedness. He is currently researching pre-nuptial agreements & the meaning of marriage as well as methodological questions of feasibility in political theory.

Julio Montero

“I am now a permanent member of the National Research Council of Argentina in the area of philosophy and an associate professor at the Philosophy Department at University of Buenos Aires, where I teach courses on ethics, human rights and philosophy of law. My work has been published in prestigious peers reviewed journals, such as Metaphilosophy, Human Rights Review and Journal of Political Philosophy. Together with Saladin Meckled-Garcia (UCL) and Moises Vaca (UNAM, Mexico) I created the UK-Latin America Network for Political Philosophy under the auspice of the British Academy. I was chair of Amnesty International Argentina (2007-2010). In 2017 I was awarded the Konex prize, one of the most prestigious academic distinctions in the country.”

Alice Moore

Alice is an Assistant Professor in Public Management and Public Policy in the School of Government at the University of Birmingham. Her research explores how governments can work effectively with external organisations to deliver public services and meet urgent policy challenges. She is working on a project that investigates how different forms of outsourcing and partnerships change the way people engage with public services and their broader attitudes towards the state. She continues to collaborate with colleagues from UCL on projects that investigate how relationships between communities and government are changing through innovative practices in Grimsby, UK, and how municipal governments are collaborating to take advantage of and meet the challenges of rapid technological change.

Alice completed her PhD at UCL in 2024. Her thesis, supervised by Professor Mark Esteve, Dr Colin Provost, and Professor Christian Schuster, explored how competition in public procurement markets shapes the way contracts are managed and how management approaches likewise influence those markets. A chapter from this thesis won the Christopher Pollitt Prize for Best Paper at the 2024 conference of the International Research Society for Public Management.

Ruxandra Serban 

Ruxandra Serban is a Lecturer in Politics and Qualitative Methods at Birkbeck, University of London. From 2023 to 2026, she was an Associate Lecturer (Teaching) in Democratic and Authoritarian Politics in the Department of Political Science at UCL. From 2019 to 2023, Ruxandra was an LSE Fellow in Qualitative Research Methods in the Department of Methodology at the LSE. Her research agenda focuses on parliamentary procedures and practices in different countries, and her work has been published in comparative politics journals such as Government and Opposition and the British Journal of Politics and International Relations. 
 
Ruxandra was awarded her PhD from UCL in January 2020. Her thesis, supervised by Professor Meg Russell and Professor Alan Renwick, investigated parliamentary mechanisms through which prime ministers are questioned by parliamentarians in different countries, placing the UK’s PMQs in a comparative context for the first time. During her PhD she worked as a Research Assistant at the Constitution Unit. She also holds an MSc in Democracy and Comparative Politics (2014) from UCL.