Hannah Greber and Teresa Weikmann each received a sowi:doc award for their dissertations, which they completed this year with "summa cum laude" (highest honors). The award decision was made by an interdisciplinary committee of experts appointed by the Dean of our Faculty. Both theses were supervised by Sophie Lecheler.

Hannah wrote her doctoral thesis Immersive journalism – The future of the news? on immersive journalism. After completing her PhD, she joined Sophie Lecheler's Political Communication Research Group as a postdoctoral researcher in July 2024. Teresa's dissertation Getting real with fakes: Characteristics and consequences of 'deepfakes' in democracies was all about the importance of deepfakes and the challenges that arise from the phenomenon. Teresa has been working as a postdoctoral researcher at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR) in the Netherlands since September 2024. Short abstracts of Hannah's and Teresa's dissertations can be viewed here.

The sowi:doc Awards for outstanding dissertations are being awarded once a year by the Vienna Doctoral School of Social Sciences (ViDSS) and come with prize money of € 1.500. General information on the application procedure and the award can be found on the ViDSS website.