After receiving the Award of Excellence recently, Jana Laura Egelhofer was now honored with an sowi:doc Award for her dissertation entitled I don't like it – let's call it 'fake' – The content and consequences of the fake news debate, supervised by Sophie Lecheler. Jana completed her dissertation with "summa cum laude" in December 2021. In her dissertation, she investigated how the "fake news" term has been instrumentalized by politicians in order to discredit critical news outlets, and how this and other incidents of media criticism affect citizens' media perceptions. Since December 2022, Jana is a postdoctoral researcher within the Munich Science Communication Lab hosted at the LMU Munich, after being a predoc as well as postdoc in Sophie Lecheler's Political Communication Research Group since 2017.

Andreas Nanz also received a sowi:doc Award for his outstanding dissertation dealing with Incidental exposure in the online world: Antecedents, mechanisms, and consequences. His dissertation, completed in August 2022 with "summa cum laude", was supervised by Jörg Matthes. Andreas's work studied the phenomenon of incidental exposure – a term that describes situations in which individuals stumble upon (political) information even though they did not intend to be exposed to such information. Andreas is now a postdoctoral researcher in Jörg Matthes's Advertising & Media Psychology Research Group since October 2022.

The sowi:doc Awards for outstanding dissertations are being awarded once a year by the Vienna Doctoral School of Social Sciences and come with prize money of € 1.500. A short abstract of both dissertations as well as further information on the sowi:doc Awards procedure can be found here.