Scientific Advisory Board

Professor Banducci has 20 years of experience on international, collaborative projects (such as the New Zealand Election Study and the European Election Study). Recently she has been involved as principal investigator and co-principal investigator in research projects supported by the UK’S Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the European Commission. Consequently Susan Banducci is also widely experienced in scientific collaboration on an international level and has served on a number of review panels including the FP7 review panel in Brussels, the Independent Research Council of Denmark and the ESRC's Grants Assessment Panel. She has held a number of academic management positions at the University of Exeter, including her service as Director of the Centre for European Studies, Head of Department of Politics and Associate Dean of Education in the College of Social Science and International Studies. She is currently the director of the Exeter Q-Step Centre.

Alan Irwin is a Professor in the Department of Organization at Copenhagen Business School (CBS) and also the CBS Vice President for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. From 2007-14, he was Dean of Research at CBS. He was Acting President during 2011. Previously, he was Professor of Science and Technology Policy, and Dean of Social and Environmental Studies, at the University of Liverpool. His PhD is from the University of Manchester and he has held previous appointments at Manchester and at Brunel University. Currently, he is a member of the Strategy Advisory Board for the UK Global Food Security Programme. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, a foreign member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, and an Honorary Fellow of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Alan Irwin has published over a number of years on issues of science and technology policy, scientific governance, environmental sociology and science-public relations.

Lilach Nir (Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania) holds a dual appointment as core faculty in the Department of Communication and Journalism and in the Department of Political Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. She specializes in public opinion, mass media effects, and comparative political communication. Prof. Nir is a former Fulbright Fellow to the United States. She has served in the past on the International Communication Association (ICA’s) Executive Board and as Editor-in-Chief of Oxford’s International Journal of Public Opinion Research. She is currently a member of the research publications evaluation taskforce, appointed by the Planning and Budgeting Committee of the Council for Higher Education in Israel. Her publications include journal articles on public opinion perceptions, cross-national differences in news exposure and its effects, and the contribution of political disagreement to opinion quality. Her work has won a number of best paper awards and professional recognition, and appeared or is currently in press in PNAS: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Journal of Communication, American Political Science Review, Public Opinion Quarterly, Political Communication, and Communication Research.

Peter Pels is Professor of Anthropology and Sociology of Africa at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology of Leiden University since 2003. In 1993 he graduated in social anthropology at the University of Amsterdam on a study of interactions between missionaries and Africans in late colonial Tanganyika. Between 1995 and 2003 he worked at the Research Centre Religion and Society of the University of Amsterdam. He is a specialist in the study of religion and politics in situations of colonial contact, the history of anthropology, the anthropology of magic, and social science ethics. He was the editor-in-chief of Social Anthropology/Anthropologie sociale, the journal of the European Association of Social Anthropologists, between 2003 and 2007. He was advisor on religion and materiality to the Çatalhöyük archaeological project in Turkey. His new book entitled “The Spirit of Matter. Religion, Modernity and the Power of Objects” is under review and he currently coordinates research into modern conceptions of the future, museums, and heritage.