Juliana Chueri, born in 1986, has been appointed Associate Professor of Political Science and Blockchain. She is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, a position she has held since 2023. Juliana Chueri obtained her doctorate in Political Science from the University of Geneva in 2020, followed by a lecturing position at Leiden University and a postdoctoral fellowship at IDHEAP, University of Lausanne. Her research lies at the intersection of comparative political economy and welfare state research, examining how welfare states respond to political and technological change. Chueri’s work spans the welfare politics of the populist radical right, platform work, AI-driven labour market transformation and redistributive conflict. She has published in leading journals including Perspectives on Politics, West European Politics, Political Studies, Party Politics, Journal of European Social Policy and The International Journal of Press/Politics. Juliana Chueri is principal investigator of an ERC Starting Grant on redistributive politics in the wake of the AI revolution, and is also co-principal investigator or co-applicant on projects funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and the Swedish Research Council.
Petter Törnberg, born in 1987, has been appointed Full Professor of Political Science and Blockchain. He is currently Associate Professor of Computational Social Science at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC), University of Amsterdam, where he since 2023 heads the AI, Culture & Society Research Unit. Petter Törnberg obtained his doctorate in complex systems from Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg in 2017, and qualified as "docent" there in 2022. Törnberg’s research combines computational methods and social theory to examine how digital technologies reshape politics and society, with particular focus on social media, online platforms, political polarization, misinformation and Artificial Intelligence. He has published in leading journals including PNAS, New Media & Society, Big Data & Society, Artificial Intelligence Review and The International Journal of Press/Politics, and is co-author of the Routledge monographs Intimate Communities of Hate and Seeing Like a Platform. Petter Törnberg’s research has been supported by major competitive funding, including NWO Veni and Vidi grants as principal investigator, Swedish research grants, and EU Horizon funding. He is a member of De Jonge Akademie of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW).
Both will take up their positions at the University of Lucerne on 1 January 2027. Their appointments are part of the second wave of professorial appointments associated with the ZIBR to be announced. The Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences already has chairs in Philosophy (Patrik Hummel) and Sociology and Blockchain (Adam Hayes). At the Faculty of Law, professorships have been established in Energy Law (Max Baumgart), Public Law (Markus Schreiber) and Private Law and Blockchain (Claude Humbel). Appointment procedures are currently underway in Political Economy, Health Sciences, and Psychology and Blockchain, with these positions due to be filled during 2027. Once these appointments have been made, all nine areas envisaged for the ZIBR's start-up phase will be represented across four faculties.
ZIBR professors also teach at the University of Lucerne, so students benefit directly from their expertise in this field.
