Stephanie Gast Zepeda

Research Area

Development and Socio-Economic Policies 

Short Biography

Stephanie is a research associate to the Gerhard Haniel Professor for Public Policy and International Development, Prof. Achim Kemmerling. She is interested in political communication and computational social science. Her PhD project focuses on the public discourse on digitalisation and its socio-economic implications in Germany.

She holds a B.A. in International Cultural and Business Studies from the University of Passau and an M.A. in International Political Economy from King’s College London. In her B.A. thesis she studied the association between cosmopolitanism and migration by correlating survey results from several countries with data on migrant stocks. For her M.A. thesis she analysed issue salience in public opinion, the European Parliament and EU legislation, for which she relied on Eurobarometer survey results and a unique dataset of topics modelled with Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). Before joining the Brandt School, Stephanie gained professional experience in the public and private sector through different international internships and fellowships.