Niels Mede appointed Assistant Professor at Wageningen University & Research (WUR)
On July 1, Dr. Niels G. Mede started a new position as an assistant professor at Wageningen University & Research, Netherlands. The tenure-track position focuses on communication in life science contexts and is embedded in the Strategic Communication Group chaired by Prof. Dr. Rens Vliegenthart.
Niels Mede has been working in the Science Communication Division of Prof. Dr. Mike S. Schäfer since 2018 – first as a Research Assistant and since 2023 as a Senior Research and Teaching Associate. During that time, he was a visiting scholar at the University of Wisconsin—Madison, Oxford Internet Institute, Queensland University of Technology, and the Digital Democracy Centre at the University of Southern Denmark.
In 2022, he completed his PhD at IKMZ with a thesis on the conceptualization and measurement of "science-related populism", which won the 2023 Dissertation Award of the Swiss Association of Communication and Media Research (SGKM). He was – and continues to be – part of the Science Barometer Switzerland project team and has co-led the award-winning 68-country study "Trust in Science and Science-Related Populism". At Wageningen University & Research, he will continue his research on public opinion and communication about science and expand it further.