Ny ph.d.-studerende - Simon Damgaard Nielsen

Hello everyone :)

My name is Simon, and I’ve just started my PhD at the department this week. Some of you may know me from my time as a student assistant at CFA. But this is a return to the university for me, since I have worked two years outside of academia, where I did data collection and analysis for a company called Epinion.

My project is about restrictions on international cooperation in science and how these affect international research production, mobility and output. Specifically, I am going to use computational social science methods on a large database of policy documents to try to map and organize formal legislation, guidelines and measures comparatively across countries and over time and couple this with bibliometric data on international research cooperation. Currently, I am using theory on protectionism to give meaning to these policy initiatives, which is why I label my project scientific protectionism.

More informally, I will try to research how changing geopolitics is affecting international research. There has been an abundance of examples in recent years where states and research institutions are increasing or introducing formal rules like dual use, counter-espionage measures, restricting academic migration and withdrawal from multilateral organizations. The goal is to further our understanding of this development and how it is affecting individual scientists and countries more broadly. I will be joining CFA with Jesper Schneider as my main supervisor, but I am also interested in comparative politics with Roman Senninger as my co-supervisor.

Outside of work, I like running in the Marselisborg Forests with Aarhus 1900 and brewing a much too detailed recipe for a cup of coffee (or any form of cooking more generally). Other than that, I recently started taking dance classes with my fiancée, where she has danced for 24 years straight and I am a complete beginner.

You are very welcome to drop by my office at 1331-030 if you want to chat about international cooperation in science, changing geopolitics, text-as-data methods, causal inference or just if you want a coffee break.