Sandy Schumann

Sandy Schumann (PhD) is a Lecturer at University College London, Department of Security and Crime Science, the programme director of the MSc Countering Extremist Crime and Terrorism, as well as the co-lead of UCL’s chapter of the UK Reproducibility Network. Her current research examines online harms victimisation, hate speech desensitisation, and the dynamics by which extremist content online can shape violence offline. She takes an interdisciplinary approach and works in the borderlands of communication science, social psychology, and terrorism studies. She is also passionate about meta-research, improving research methods and analyses procedures in extremism and terrorism studies. In the past, she has studied risk factors of radicalisation more broadly, computer-mediated intergroup contact, and online collective action. Sandy is keen to translate her research into policy and practice. Doing so, she advises governments (e.g., London Violence Reduction Unit Online Harms Steering Committee, UK Commission on Countering Extremism, UAE Ministry of Culture and Knowledge Development) and collaborates with civil society organisations, such as Soliya, to conduct impact evaluations.