Daphna Canetti is a professor of political psychology and the Dean of the Herta and Paul Amir Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Haifa. Her research focuses on the micro-foundations of political conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere. She is particularly interested in the impact of individual-level exposure to cyber-terrorism and political violence on war/peace attitudes. Methodologically, she uses controlled randomised field experiments, spatial analysis, survey experiments, bio-political and physiological-political research. She has received over $3 million in research grants to study people in conflict zones. She serves on the editorial boards of The Journal of Political Psychology, Journal of Peace Research, and the Journal of Conflict Resolution. She was a Fulbright Fellow and a Visiting Fellow at the Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies, Notre Dame University, as well as a Rice Family Foundation Visiting Professor at the Council on Middle East Studies, the MacMillan Center and the Department of Political Science, Yale University.
Keren Levy Ganany Snider is a postdoctoral scholar in the School of Political Science at the University of Haifa, Israel, as well as an instructor at the University of Haifa and Ben-Gurion University. Dr. L.G. Snider specializes in psycho-political consequences of terrorism, mass political attitudes and behavior, immigration and refugee politics and survey experiments research. She uses rigorous quantitative methodologies to apply principles taken from political psychology to study public opinions under conflict and violence.
Ryan Shandler is a PhD candidate at the University of Haifa in the School of Political Science. His research focuses on the intersection between technology and international security. Ryan draws on theories of political psychology to understand the political effects of cyber-threats and develop Internet age theories of political participation. His research primarily utilizes natural experiments, large-N surveys and controlled laboratory studies. He is a research fellow at the Center for Cyber, Law & Policy, an inaugural fellow of the IDIT Doctoral Program, and a recipient of the Yakir Award for Outstanding Doctoral Research.
Shani Fachter received her PhD in Political Sciences from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2021. Shani’s research focuses on the effect of political activists’ presence on intergroup violence atfriction points during ongoing conflict. In her research, Shani uses experimental methodology including laboratory experiments and cutting-edge technology such as virtual reality equipment. Shani’s research interests are intergroup violence, ideology and political activism, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She has published peer-reviewed articles in the Journal of Conflict Resolution and Behaviour & Information Technology.
Sharon Matzkin is a PhD candidate at the University of Haifa in the School for Political Sciences. Her main research interests focus on the political economy of cyberattacks. Drawing upon economics, political science and political psychology, she examines how political institutions, the political environment, and cyber-economy form a unique ecosystem which influence each other. She primarily deals with the politico-psychological aspects of cyber-attacks on financial markets and how those, in turn affect public confidence in government institutions and mass political attitudes. She utilizes rigorous quantitative research methods with large data samples. In her thesis titled Public Confidence Following Lethal and Financial Conventional and Cyber Terror: Survey-Experiments in Trilateral Democracies she utilized structural-equation modeling with data collected in three countries.
Gal Dor is a PhD candidate at the University of Haifa in the School of Political Science. Her research focuses on the psychological mechanisms behind the cognitive heuristics of decision-making process. In her research, Gal uses experimental methods to analyze decision patterns and biases in the context of exposure to conventional and cybernetic threats. Her research utilizes a unique combination of virtual reality and an AI-based simulator to analyze decision making.
Snehashree Mukherjee is a conflict-investigative journalist from India. She is pursuing her PhD at the School of Government and Political Science, University of Haifa. Her areas of interest are soft cyber-terrorism; disinformation and propaganda by terrorist organizations on cyber platforms; influence operations in the cyber-space; and information-warfare. Her approach is mainly focused on understanding the psychological reception to persuasive and manipulative cyber-communication disseminated in conflict-zones and its effects. Apart from being a journalist and researcher, she loves to paint and explore the world of meta-physics.
Amit Cohen is pursuing her Master’s degree is political science. She has a bachelor’s degree in political science, Middle East and Islam. Amit serves in the Israeli police cadets program as a crime investigator as part of “Atudot for Israel”. Her thesis focuses on the effects of cyber terrorism under the guidance of Prof. Daphna Canetti. Her research interests include terrorism and political violence in the Middle East, and religious radicalism.
Giulia Dal Bello is a young scholar of political violence from Italy. She is pursuing her PhD in the School of Political Science at the University of Haifa. Her research interests are digital surveillance and democracy, cyber and conventional terrorism, and cognitive warfare in asymmetrical conflicts. In her research, she employs experimental methods to analyse psychological reception and response to terrorist attacks. She is a research fellow of the IDIT Doctoral Program.