OUR ALUMNI
Many of our Presidential fellows and faculty continue on to pursue impactful, diverse careers with skills they cultivate through their work with TCV and the University.
Janani Balaji
Dr. Janani Balaji worked with the TCV as a fellow from 2012 to 2016. She graduated with a Ph.D. from Georgia State in 2016. Since then, she has been working as a Data Scientist at CareerBuilder.
Some of her research focus includes graph data management, graph analytics, distributed databases, distributed computing, machine learning and natural language processing.
Specializations
Graph data management, graph analytics, distributed databases, distributed computing, machine learning and natural language processing.
Allison Betus
Allison Betus has been awarded the Provost’s Dissertation Fellowship. She is a former Craigie Fellow for International Security and TCV Fellow as she comletes a Ph.D. in Communication Studies. Betus has published a number of research articles on terrorism and media coverage. She earned an M.A. in Psychology from the New School for Social Research in New York. Betus also holds a B.A. in Psychology from State University of New York at Purchase.
Betus’ research interests include prejudice formation, the impact of perpetrator identity on perceptions of terrorism, radicalization, deradicalization, and member recruitment and retention in extremist groups.
Betus’ expertise includes data analysis using SPSS, SAS, and STATA. She is also experienced with Nvivo, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, SurveyMonkey, Qualtrics, Unity and Windows Movie Maker
She has also spent time working in the private sector as a Market Analyst. Betus is a member of the American Society of Criminology, the Association for Psychological Science and the Society for Social and Personality Psychology.
Select Media Mentions:
2017 MSNBC with Ari Melber, July 2.
2017 Think Progress, June 19.
2017 Cato Institute, April 13.
2017 Reason, March 24.
2017 The Independent, March 13.
Kearns, E., Betus, A., Lemieux, A. (2017, March 13) Yes, the media do underreport some terrorist attacks. Just not the ones most people think of. The Washington Post.
Kareem El Damanhoury
Kareem El Damanhoury is an Assistant Professor position with The University of Denver Department of Media, Film and Journalism Studies. His research focuses on visual communication, international/intercultural communication, and media and conflict. El Damanhoury also works as a freelance journalist with CNN International and has covered news stories in the U.S. and abroad.
He has co-authored a book, Proto-state Media Systems: Al-Qaeda and ISIS as Exemplars with Oxford University Press forthcoming in 2021, and is under contract to produce Photographic Warfare: ISIS, Egypt and the Online Battle for Sinai with the University of Georgia Press.
Aaron Dicker
Aaron Dicker is a Graduate Research Fellow pursuing his Ph.D in Communication at Georgia State. Dicker teaches courses in Communication at the university as well as coaching intercollegiate debate at multiple universities.
Dicker was a Presidential Fellow from 2015 to 2017. His research interests include argumentation, anti-Semitism, visual rhetoric, social movements, and terrorism.
He also previously worked for the Quality Enhancement Plan at Wiley College where he implemented curricula utilizing academic debate as a conflict resolution and educational tool. He’s a current member of the National Communication Association (NCA), the Rhetoric Society of America (RSA), and the Southern States Communication Association (SSCA).
Publications:
Winkler, C., El Damanhoury, K., Dicker, A., Luu, Y., Kaczkowski, W. & El-Karhili, N.(2020) “Considering the military-media nexus from the perspective of competing groups: the case of ISIS and al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula” Dynamics of Asymmetric Conflict, 13:1, 3-23, DOI: 10.1080/17467586.2019.1630744
Winkler, C., El Damanhoury, K., Dicker, A. & Lemieux, A.F. (2018) “Images of death and dying in ISIS media: A comparison of English and Arabic print publications” Media, War & Conflict DOI: 10.1177/1750635217746200
El Damanhoury, K., Winkler, C., Kaczkowski, W., & Dicker, A. (2018). “Examining the military–media nexus in ISIS’s provincial photography campaign” Dynamics of Asymmetric Conflict, 1-20. DOI: 10.1080/17467586.2018.1432869
Winkler, C., El Damanhoury, K., Dicker, A., & Lemieux, A. (2016). “The Medium is Terrorism: Transformation of the About to Die Trope in Dabiq” Terrorism and Political Violence. DOI: 10.1080/09546553.2016.1211526
Michael Jablonski
Michael Jablonski is an attorney and author. He is a graduate of Georgia State University, receiving his Ph.D. in Communication Studies in 2022, having successfully defended his dissertation titled “Image Frames, Cascading Activation, and Formation of Foreign Policy: A Case Study of the 2012 Benghazi Attacks.” He is the author of the book The Real Cyber War: The Political Economy of Internet Freedom with Dr. Shawn Powers. The book won the ISA International Communication (ICOMM) Best Book Award in 2017.
Specializations
Formerly a TCV Presidential Fellow, his work is focused on the political economy of information employed by violent political extremist, exploitation by violent political extremist of incumbent practices in western, online media, and the establishment of radical and extremist identities over time through discourses that interact with less radical communities.
Wojciech Kaczkowski
Wojciech Kaczkowski is an Evaluation Fellow at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. He earned his P.hD. in Community psychology in 2020. His work focuses on violence prevention.
As a Presidential Fellow, his work looked at the use of images of children in Islamic State propaganda, the qualitative analysis of first-hand narratives of sexual violence perpetration, and the bystander intervention in situations involving sexual aggression. Kaczkowski worked on a MINERVA-granted project to investigate the Pathways of Child Mobilization into Violent Extremist Organizations.
Specializations
Research interests focus on social and cultural factors that contribute to the development of violent behaviors and attitudes. Specifically, he is interested in examining risk and protective factors for gender-based violence and radicalization into violent extremism, as well as the relationship between these two forms of violent behavior.
Publications
Kaczkowski, W., Swartout, KM, Branum-Martin, L., Horgan, J.G., Lemieux, A.F. 2020 “Impact of Perceived Peer Attitudes and Social Network Diversity on Violent Extremist Intentions” Terrorism and Political Violence, 1-19
Kaczkowski, W., Lokmanoglu, A., Winkler, C. 2020 “Definitions matter: a comparison of the global terrorism database and the US governmental reports of terrorist incidents in Western Europe, 2002-2016” Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 1-18
Kaczkowski, W., Swartout, K.M. “Exploring gender differences in sexual and reproductive health literacy among young people from refugee backgrounds” 2020 Culture, Health & Sexuality 22 (4), 369-384
Winkler, C., El-Damanhoury, K., Dicker, A., Luu, Y., Kaczkowski, W, N El-Karhili 2020. “Considering the military-media nexus from the perspective of competing groups: the case of ISIS and al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula” Dynamics of Asymmetric Conflict 13 (1), 3-23
Winkler, C., Dewick, L., Luu, J., Kaczkowski, W. 2020 “Dynamic/static image use in ISIS’s media campaign: An audience involvement strategy for achieving goals” Terrorism and Political Violence, 1-19
Sanghoon Lee
Sanghoon Lee received his Ph.D degree in Computer Science from Georgia State University in 2016. He was a TCV fellow in 2015. He is currently working as a postdoctoral fellow at Emory University School of Medicine. He has published papers to Cell, Nature Sci. Report, and Cancer Research as well as many branches of IEEE and ACM. His research interests include machine learning, deep learning, data mining and information retrieval.
Specializations
Research interests include machine learning, deep learning, data mining and information retrieval.
Weeda Mehran
Following her work as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in terrorism and media research at Georgia State, Dr. Weeda Mehran accepted a position as a faculty member with the The University of Exeter.
Dr. Meharan completed her Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge in the Department of Politics and International Studies. In 2007, she obtained a master’s degree in Sociology from the University of Oxford as the first Afghan woman to graduate from Oxford University. She also holds an M.A. in International Conflict Analysis from Kent University. Mehran earned her B.A. with honors in Environment and Society & Sociology from the University of Toronto.
Dr. Mehran was a 2018 VoxPol visiting scholar at Dublin City University where she conducted research on extremists’ media strategies. Her research takes a multidisciplinary approach to studying propaganda campaign across a number of extremists groups such as Taliban, the Islamic State, Al Qaeda, Tahrik-e Taliban of Pakistan and Lashkar-e Taiba.
Mehran has worked with a number of organizations such as Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, Afghanistan Public Policy Research, Free and Fair Election Foundation of Afghanistan, Integrity Watch Afghanistan, Afghanistan Research, Evaluation Unit, and a number of UN organizations (e.g. UNWomen, UNDP). She has written numerous policy reports on issues in Afghanistan. She worked as a visiting scholar at the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy in 2016, Hamburg University. Mehran also served as Supervisor in the Department of Politics at the University of Cambridge.
Mehran is fluent in Persian, speaks advanced Pashtu and French, as well as intermediate German and basic Arabic. She has working knowledge of STATA, SPSS, R, Gephi, Ucinet, LIWC, and NVivo.
Shawn Powers
Shawn Powers is the Acting Chief Strategy Officer with the U.S. Agency for Global Media. He formerly served as the Executive Director of the United States Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy. During his time at Georgia State, Dr. Powers worked with the TCV and served as Assistant Professor of Communication. His research, as exemplified by his book, The Real Cyber War: A Political Economy of Internet Freedom [with Michael Jablonski] (U. of Illinois Press, 2015), specializes in international political communication with particular attention to the geopolitics of information and technology policy. Dr. Powers co-led the University’s European Union and British Council funded project on Civic Approaches to Religious Conflict. He also directed the Center for Global Information Studies and served on the Board of Advisors for the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy. The British Foreign Council, the U.S. Institute of Peace, the Open Society Foundation, the U.S. Department of State, the World Bank, and the Knight Foundation have supported his research.
Specializations
Civic Approaches to Religious Conflict, Global information studies
Nagham El Karhili
Dr. Nagham El Karhili earned her Ph.D. in Communication Studies with an emphasis in Media and Society in 2021. She successfully defended her dissertation titled: “Identity Tetris: Transnational Muslim NGOs within Global Contexts.” She earned a master’s degree in Science in Communications from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. She also holds a B.A. in Political Science International Relations from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
As a Presidential Fellow with the TCV Initiative, El Karhili examined best practices for Muslim NGOs. Her research focus is on international political communication with particular attention to communications strategies countering violent extremist narratives. She is also interested in intercultural communication with specific application to the Middle East.
El Karhili was a Presidential Fellow for the EU-funded Civic Approaches to Religious Conflict and Violence project. She also serves as Project Manager with the American Turkish Friendship Council. El Karhili is fluent in Arabic, French, and English. In 2014, she won Thesis of the Year at her alma mater, the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
Houda Abadi
Dr. Houda Abadi is the founder and executive director of Transformative Peace, a consulting firm that specializes in inclusive peace processes; women, peace and security; human rights-based approaches in preventing violent extremism; and civic engagement. Dr. Abadi earned her Ph.D. in Political Communication and Media Studies from Georgia State University. She was a 2013-2014 Transcultural Conflict and Violence Presidential Fellow.
Dr. Abadi joined The Carter Center in June 2014 as Associate Director of the Conflict Resolution Program. For the first two years at the Carter Center, Dr. Abadi worked on Syria and the Israel-Palestine conflict. During that time, she developed what is now the Inclusive Approaches to Preventing Violent Extremism Project.
Yannick Veilleux-Lepage
Dr. Veilleux-Lepage is an Assistant Professor with the Institute of Security and Global Affairs at Leiden University.
He worked previously as a Senior Researcher in the Transcultural Conflict and Violence Initiative. Here, he worked on Department of Defense-funded projects analyzing online extremist discourse and media products produced by extremist groups.
Dr. Veilleux-Lepage’s new book How Terror Evolves: The Emergence and Spread of Terrorist Techniques was published in 2019 by Rowman and Littlefield International. Veilleux-Lepage has recently secured a Canadian Network for Research on Terrorism, Security, and Society major research grant in collaboration with Dr. Barbara Perry.
His research interests include the creation of online narratives and propaganda which fosters or normalizes terrorism; historical antecedents to terrorism; far-right extremism and the transnational links of far-right groups; ideological and technical diffusion, and the application of evolutionary theory to social sciences. Prior to undertaking his doctoral studies, Dr. Veilleux-Lepage worked as a senior intelligence analyst specializing in international terrorism and emerging threats for the Government of Canada.
Daniel Snook
Daniel Snook is a Researcher with NYU Abu Dhabi where he is studying violent extremism. He earned his his Ph.D. in Community Psychology with emphasis in the psychology of terrorism.
His research framework is a mix of applied social and community psychology. He worked primarily with Dr. John Horgan and the Violent Extremism Research Group (VERG). He focus is on social cognition related to intergroup threat, violence, and terrorism and Americans’ judgments and decision-making related to terrorism and the role intergroup threat and motivated social cognition play in far-right terrorism.
Snook was selected as a recipient of the American Psychological Foundation’s 2020-2021 scholarship by the Council of Graduate Departments of Psychology (COGDOP). His work includes conducting research on issues of measurement in the psychology of religion, the psychology of religious conversion, and the influence of crisis on identity transformation and intergroup violence. He has experience working with more than 15 program evaluations and is currently evaluating countering violent extremism programs and homelessness interventions.
He teaches Research Design and Analysis, a junior-level research methods and statistics course in the psychology department. He also has worked in the non-profit sector as a research analyst. His expertise includes data analysis and reporting, including mass data management using Excel, SPSS, MPlus and MaxQDA.
Ari Fodeman
Ari Fodeman received his Ph.D. in Psychology in 2022, having successfully defended his dissertation titled “Power to the People: Testing for Measurement Invariance Across Integrated Radicalism Research.” In 2021, he accepted the Craigie International Security Studies Fellowship to complete his dissertation which focused on integrating approximately 60 datasets using the Activism and Radicalism Intentions Scales. Fodeman earned an M.A. in Government from The Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya (IDC) with an emphasis on Conflict Resolution, Counter-Terrorism and Political Psychology. Fodeman also earned two Bachelor of Art degrees from American University in 2014. He received his first B.A. in Psychology and another in International Relations.
Fodeman is a current member of The Institute of Counter-Terrorism (Herzliya), The International Society of Political Psychology, and the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. Fodeman’s expertise includes meta-analysis, HLM, SEM, longitudinal analysis, and count modeling using statistical software such as Excel, SPSS, SAS, MPlus, R, CMA, & HLM. Fodeman speaks Spanish (intermediate), Arabic (beginner), and Hebrew (beginner).
Using both qualitative and quantitative social research methods, Fodeman studies terrorism, political violence, and extremism (dis/re-) engagement and prevention. His current work with Dr. John Horgan focuses on a MINERVA-granted project on Muslim converts’ overrepresentation in terrorism.
Meredith Pruden
Dr. Meredith Pruden is a Post-doctoral researcher at the University of North Carolina’s Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP). Pruden works on research to gauge the growing impact on society of the internet, social media and other digital communications. She earned her doctorate in June 2021 in the Department of Communication: Media & Society at Georgia State University. She earned her Master of Arts degree in Communication from Georgia State and her Bachelor of Science in Communication from Kennesaw State University. She holds a minor in professional writing and currently is also completing a graduate certificate in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies.
With a professional background as a journalist, Pruden’s long-term goal is to be a public intellectual working at the intersection of academia and the popular press. To date, she has had academic research published in Communication, Culture and Critique on conservative populism and journalistic practice, in VISTA: Visual Culture Journal on memes as decolonial political struggle, and in the edited volume Misogyny and Media in the Age of Trump on mediated misogyny and conservative populism.
Pruden also has presented her research at numerous conferences, including the International Communication Association (ICA), the International Critical Media Literacy Conference (ICML), the Lisbon Winter School for the Study of Communication: Media and Populism, the National Communication Association (NCA), and the Popular Culture Association (PCA). She has been accepted to both the Centre for Research on Extremism (C-REX) Extremism & Democracy Summer School and the Conference on Right-Wing Studies/Conference for Research on Male Supremacism (jointly hosted by the Center for Right-Wing Studies and the Institute for Research on Male Supremacism) for 2021. Both originally were slated for summer 2020 but were postponed for the coronavirus pandemic. She currently serves as an NCA Feminist and Gender Studies Division Graduate Student Representative and sits on the GSU Student Communication Committee as the Graduate Student at Large.
Previously, Pruden was a freelance writer and staff editor for several magazines. She also has worked as a marketing copywriter for numerous corporations. On a personal note, Pruden is mom to both two-legged and four-legged kiddos and loves water sports, including surfing, scuba diving, kayaking, and stand-up paddle.
Krishanu Sarker
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Krishanu Sarker is pursuing a Ph.D. in Computer Science with the Department of Computer Science. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Dhaka in 2014.
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Sarker’s research framework covers Data Mining, Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Neural Network. His primary focus is in Computer Vision and Deep Learning. His current research goal is to develop data efficient learning of Deep Neural Networks.
Sarker has worked on diverse research topics in Computer Science. He began his research experience studying Body Sensor Networks and also worked on Seismic Underearth Imaging. His current research is focused on Developing Data Efficient Learning methodology for Deep Neural Net Models and stabilizing Generative Adversarial Network.
Sarker serves as Intel’s AI Student Ambassador for Georgia State University. He is a member of the ACM, IEEE and the Computer Science Club.
His background includes extensive programming skills, including Languages: Python, C/C++, Java, Matlag/Octave Databases: MongoDB, MySQL Platforms & Frameworks: Unix, Pytorch, Tensorflow, Caffe, OpenCV, NS-3, and CORE. He also speaks fluent English and Bangla.
Awards:
Sarker received the Outstanding Graduate Service Award from Georgia State’s Department of Computer Science which recognizes extraordinary service to the students and department.
Recipient of the DELL-EMC Grand Prize at the Scientific Computing Day Conference in 2018.
He also received the Best Poster award at the SCD conference in the Advanced Analytics track.
Some of Sarker’s past work includes Real-time Monitoring of Crop Diseases and Pests Using Image Sensor Network Technology. That 2014 work was funded by Bangladesh’s Ministry of Science and Technology
Kristian Kastner Warpinski
Dr. Warpinski is pursuing a Ph.D. in Political Science with a concentration in Comparative Politics and International Relations. In 2014, she received her Master of Arts, with honors, in International Conflict and Security from the University of Kent: Brussels School of International Studies. In 2013, she earned a Bachelor of Science in Political Science with a concentration in International and Comparative Studies from the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga.
While earning her MA, Warpinski also worked with the European Strategic Intelligence and Security Center in Brussels, Belgium as a Research Intern focused on Africa. She monitored open source intelligence and published real-time alerts on security concerns, including: terrorism, piracy, ethnic and sectarian violence.
In 2018, she was awarded an American Political Science Association (APSA) First Generation Scholar’s Travel Grant. She is a member of the American Political Science Association, the British International Studies Association, and the Society of Terrorism Research.
Warpinski speaks English and French (Intermediate reading and writing; introductory conversational)
Ayse Lokmanoglu
Dr. Ayse Lokmanoglu is a Post-doctoral researcher with Northwestern University Center for Communication and Public Policy. Lokmanoglu will be working on research in the area of computational social science for the ongoing work to examine online political and health misinformation.
As a member of the Department of Communication, Lokmanoglu earned her Ph.D. in Communication Studies in June 2021. She also has an M.A. in Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. She earned a B.A. in Economics and Near Eastern Studies from Cornell University. Lokmanoglu’s dissertation focused on Monetary Economics as State Building – Non-State Actor Propaganda Challenging Traditional Norms of Statehood.
Lokmanoglu was a Presidential Fellow with Georgia State’s TCV initiative, a group of multi-disciplinary scholars working to root out the causes and solutions in transcultural conflicts and violence across the globe.
Her research focuses on malign digital campaigns (hate speech, extremism and disinformation) and utilizing qualitative and quantitative approaches to inform real-world solutions.
Lokmanoglu has published her research on Transhistorical Artifact and an Ideograph in Islamic State’s Communication in Studies in Conflict and Terrorism.
Lokmanoglu has conducted research in numerous regions, including: Ankara, Istanbul, Mersin and Izmir, Turkey. Her research includes frequent visits to Non-Camp Refugee Living Sites to carry out aid work and interviews with local non-governmental organizations.
Contact Us
Transcultural Conflict and Violence Initiative
Mailing Address
Georgia State University
P.O. Box 4000
Atlanta, GA 30302-4000