SPIRe warmly welcomes our new colleagues: Dr Elisa D'Amico, Dr Nikita Khokhlov, and Dr Farsan Ghassim
From left to right: Dr Elisa D'Amico, Dr Nikita Khokhlov, Dr Farsan Ghassim
Dr Elisa D'Amico (Lecturer/Assistant Professor - Ad Astra Fellow)
Dr Elisa D’Amico is an Assistant Professor in Environmental Politics in the School of Politics and International Relations. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science and specializes in the intersection of climate change, conflict, migration, and political economy. Her research examines both the drivers of and responses to the climate-conflict nexus, investigating how environmental shocks shape conflict dynamics, peace processes, and migration patterns while also analyzing policy and institutional responses to these global issues. Her work employs computational social science methods to advance understanding in this field. Her work has appeared in the Review of International Political Economy, Journal of Peace Research, and Nature Climate Action. Before joining UCD, she held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of St Andrews working on the PeaceRep project and served as a visiting fellow at the University of Basel, where she conducted research on "Natural Resources as Objects of Conflict." Her work has been supported by grants through the World Wildlife Fund, UK Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office, and National Science Foundation. She actively translates her research into policy impact through reports, policy briefs, and engagement with organizations including the International Organization for Migration and EarthRefuge.
Dr Nikita Khokhlov (Lecturer/Assistant Professor - Ad Astra Fellow)
Dr Nikita Khokhlov is an Ad Astra Fellow in the School of Politics and International Relations, working on comparative authoritarianism, political communication, political behaviour and propaganda with a regional focus on Russia and former Soviet states. His research has been published in the American Journal of Political Science, Post-Soviet Affairs, Europe-Asia Studies, Politics & Policy and Cross-Cultural Research. He has extensive training in quantitative methods and employs natural language processing, surveys, and experiments in his work. Previously, Nikita worked as a data scientist for the World Bank and Boston Consulting Group, and as a lecturer and teaching fellow at UCD, Dublin City University and Trinity College Dublin. Nikita completed his PhD dissertation at the School of Law and Government at DCU in 2024, where he used text-as-data methods to study the determinants of elite rhetoric and policymaking in Russia based on a wide range of data on public speeches and social media activity. He stayed at the University of Oxford as a visiting doctoral scholar.
Dr Farsan Ghassim (Lecturer/Assistant Professor)
Dr Farsan Ghassim is an Assistant Professor at the School of Politics and International Relations (SPIRe). Farsan’s research concentrates on global governance and survey methodology. The principal question motivating his current research agenda is: How does the world want to be governed? Farsan’s research has appeared in the British Journal of Political Science, Perspectives on Politics, International Studies Quarterly, The Review of International Organizations, and Oxford University Press. He regularly contributes to popular media such as The Washington Post, The Conversation, the South China Morning Post, Frankfurter Rundschau, The Australian Outlook, and elsewhere. Before joining UCD, Farsan held postdoctoral fellowships at the universities of Oxford, Lund, and Maastricht. A former management consultant at Bain & Company, he also worked at the German Foreign Ministry, for the President of the European Parliament, and at the United Nations headquarters in New York. He holds a DPhil in International Relations from the University of Oxford, an MA in Global Affairs from Yale University, and a BSc in Management from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Further details are available on Farsan’s website: (opens in a new window)www.farsanghassim.com.