Bettina Hammer
Emmanuel Roman Fellow

Bettina joins Surgo as an Emmanuel Roman Fellow from the University of Chicago, where she graduated in 2020 with a BA in Sociology and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Arabic Language Track. Her BA thesis, which investigated how individuals respond when facing social rebuke for their beliefs, won the Sociology Department’s annual thesis prize. While at the University of Chicago, she served as Research Supervisor at the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, leading efforts to evaluate the role of militant propaganda in radicalization and mobilization of Western individuals. She has previously interned at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, researching American public opinion on foreign policy; with the UChicago Sociology Department, supporting research on fertility flexibility in the face of uncertainty in Malawi; and at TajRupt, a civic education NGO based in Tajikistan. She is a native German speaker.