Dr Julia Ebner named 'Austrian of the Year 2024'

Anthropologist and leader of the CSSC Violent Extremism Lab Dr Julia Ebner celebrated for her work to understand what drives people to commit terrorist attacks.

The Austrian Foreign Ministry and Austrian daily newspaper Die Presse named Dr Julia Ebner as 'Austrian of the Year 2024' (category 'international success') at a high-profile award ceremony on 23 October 2024.

This remarkable achievement comes at a time when Dr Ebner's work, researching radicalisation and conflict is more relevant than ever. Her focus with the Violent Extremism Lab is to  understand the psychological patterns that lead to violence such as suicide terrorism or the high-risk strategies of dictators.

We are dealing with global conflicts and wars, growing rates of radicalisation, the spread of conspiracy myths and the rise of the global far-right .... I want to better understand the people who are susceptible to extremism and violence, that is, the human dimension.

Dr Julia Ebner

Julia's past work has included immersive research inside extremist groups, which she wrote about in her books Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists and Going Mainstream: How Extremists are Taking Over. Her DPhil research, completed at the School, used quantitative methods and digital ethnographic research to help predict violence risk from online users, and was as a finalist for the  ESRC Impact Prize 2023 and won the MRS President’s Medal 2023.