Katrin Paula

Prof. Katrin Paula serves as Assistant Professor (tenure track) for Global Security and Technology at the TUM School of Social Sciences and Technology, Technical University of Munich, where her research bridges technological innovation and security studies through rigorous empirical analysis.

Her academic foundation includes sociology studies at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, culminating in a doctorate from the Graduate School of Economic and Social Sciences (GESS) at the University of Mannheim (2019).

Prof. Paula's research program critically examines human security and conflict policy through the lens of information technology, with pioneering work on political violence dynamics and ICT-driven mobilization. Her methodology integrates computational social science and spatial statistics to analyze protest diffusion, censorship effects in autocratic regimes, and electoral violence patterns in post-war societies, establishing her as a leading voice in technology-mediated conflict research.

Recent publications reveal a cohesive trajectory toward data-intensive conflict analysis, featuring the development of the Pro-Government Militias Database (2025), groundbreaking censorship studies in authoritarian contexts (2020), and innovative examinations of violence-clientelism interactions in elections (2019), all demonstrating methodological sophistication in spatial and temporal modeling.

Her scholarly impact is recognized through major awards:

• Dissertation Prize of the Academy of Sociology (2021)
• Lorenz von Stein Prize for best social sciences dissertation (2020)
• Dissertation Prize of the Foundation for Communication and Media Studies (2020)
• Bojanovsky Prize for censorship research (2020)

While specific advising activities and grant portfolios aren't detailed in available materials, her ERC project experience and methodological expertise suggest significant contributions to collaborative research frameworks. No laboratory or team affiliations are explicitly documented in current public profiles.