“Spotlight on...” New Doctoral Researcher Cecilia Natalie Strom

What made you choose to do a PhD?

I realized pretty early on during my Bachelors degree, that my search for more knowledge is hardly ever satisfied, so this was definitely a reason. Additionally, I would love to spread my knowledge and teach one day, especially young female students who get discouraged by the male dominated fields of computational social sciences and quantitative methodology, and show them, how inspiring and awesome it can be!

How would you explain your research topic to your grandmother?

I am researching, who is targeted by individual sanctions and if in fact they are relevant actors that can impose change within their group or network. I am focusing hereby on actors which are active in conflicts or are perpetrating human rights violations, the sanctions are imposed to call out and fine the latter. The goal is, to assess the impact those sanctions have on the intensity of the violence perpetrated through constraining and publicly shaming those actors.

What would you like the impact of your project to be?

I believe in the valuable contribution that my research can make one day, especially to the policy sector and foreign ministries designing conflict intervention tools and better understanding / raising awareness for their impact. I hope that I can make a contribution by combining sanctions research with heavily computational methods like natural language processing and network analyses, something that has not been done much in the field.

Qualitative or quantitative

Quantitative. I am a computational social science enthusiast for life.

Big conference or small workshop

I enjoy the intimacy and collegial feeling of small workshops and truly believe that this mode of sharing and working together constructively is what makes research great!

Paperback book or eBook

Whenever I can, I go analogue - so a paperback for sure!