Team

PD Dr. habil. Andreas Schwarz

Head of iRisCS-Com, founding chairman of the Risk and Crisis Communication Section of the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA, 2011-2018), co-founder of the International Crisis Communication conference series (Crisis1; most recently Crisis8 in Bucharest, 2025); co-editor of The Handbook of International Crisis and Risk Communication Research (2016, 2025). Member of the editorial board of Crisis and Risk Communication (Taylor & Francis).

Elisabeth Wagner-Olfermann

Member, PhD and collaboration in the iRisCS-Com project MoveWell (2024-2029, funded by BMFTR), research associate at the Institute for Media and Communication Studies at the TU Ilmenau with a focus on European public sphere, political communication and crisis communication. In her doctoral thesis, she examines how political leadership in cross-border crises is constructed in the media and how responsibility is attributed in multi-level government systems. She has expertise in quantitative content analysis, interdisciplinary research, teaching and consulting in the field of strategic communication.

Prof. Dr. em. Martin Löffelholz

Founder of the Crisis Communication Research Group (2001), now iRisCS-Com, and member of the Advisory Board. In his more than 300 scientific publications, including 18 books, Löffelholz deals primarily with journalism, war and crisis communication, political communication, organizational communication as well as intercultural and international aspects.

Francis Alpers

Member, PhD student (external) with an emphasis on crisis reporting of the COVID-19 pandemic and science communication. From 2021 to 2024, he was a research associate in the iRisCS-Com project DECIPHER (DFG funding). Francis Alpers studied health communication (M.A.) at the University of Erfurt until 2021.

Alexander Wilke

Member, PhD (external), MA in Corporate Communications, research assistant at Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences since 2025. Previously, he worked as a project researcher at Macromedia University of Applied Sciences in a BMBF/BMFTR-funded project on public risk communication for cyber security. Main research interests: Risk and crisis communication, change communication. Consultant at the communications agency komm.passion.

Sophia Schaller

Member, PhD candidate since 2021 working on the effects of media communication about health crises (especially COVID-19 pandemic) on people's mental health. Her research focuses on health communication, especially on researching psychological risks of media communication. She is also involved in the project "Science Communication Energy Transition" at the Group for Empirical Media Research and Political Communication (IfMK), which deals with the question of how complex technologies can be effectively communicated to the public.

Prof. Dr. Audra Diers-Lawson

Associate member, PhD, 2006 University of Texas-Austin, is a Professor of Risk and Crisis Communication at Kristiania University of Applied Sciences. She has teaching and research experience in five countries and more than 40 scientific publications in the last five to six years. She’s a founding board member and Secretary-Treasurer for the ICRCA and also the Director of the WHO/Europe Collaboration Center for Risk Communication, Community Engagement, and Infodemic Management (RCCE-IM) – the first WHO RCCE-IM collaboration centre in the world. She was a Mercator Fellow in the DFG-funded research project DECIPHER.

Prof. Dr. Bengt Johansson

Associate Member, Professor of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. His research and teaching focus on risk and crisis communication, journalism and political communication. The focus is on power and democracy in relation to societal perspectives on communication. His recent publications include "Communicating a Pandemic: Crisis Management and Covid-19 in the Nordic Countries" (edited with Øyvind Ihlen, Jenny Lindholm & Mark Blach-Ørsten) and "Political Crises" (with Orla Vigsø) in the "Handbook of International Crisis and Risk Communication Research". He was a Mercator Fellow in the DFG project DECIPHER (iRisCS-Com, 2021-2024).

Prof. Dr. Florian Meißner

Associate member, Professor of Digital Publishing at Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences. Chairman of the COST Action "AlertHub", an EU-funded research network with scientists and practitioners from more than 40 countries with the aim of researching disaster warning communication in Europe and internationally and improving its practice. Principal Investigator in the BMFTR-funded DigiFit project on risk communication in the context of cybersecurity (2022-2025). Board Member of the International Crisis and Risk Communication Association (ICRCA) and previously (2022-2024) Chair of the Risk and Crisis Communication Section of the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA).

Prof. Dr. Matthew W. Seeger

Associate Member, research on crisis and risk communication, health promotion, the role of (social) media, the failure of complex systems and resilience, recovery and renewal after crises. He is a member of the World Health Organization Guidelines Development Group for Emergency Risk Communication and co-author of the CDC guide "Crisis and Emergency Risk Communication" (2nd ed., 2015). He is co-editor of The Handbook of International Crisis and Risk Communication Research, (2025, 2nd ed. Wiley). He was co-PI of a Michigan State project investigating the Legionella outbreak associated with the Flint water crisis and an NSF-funded project focused on water contamination. He is co-director of the Center for Emerging and Infectious Diseases at Wayne State University. His work has been featured in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Atlanta Journal Constitution and Rolling Stone.

Prof. Dr. Deanna D. Sellnow

Associate Member, Professor and Director of the Department of Communication at Clemson University. Her research focuses on strategic instructional communication in the context of health, risk, safety and crisis communication. She is currently the Executive Director of the International Crisis and Risk Communication Association (ICRCA).Her research projects have been funded by, among others: United States Geological Survey (USGS), United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). She was a Mercator Fellow in the DFG-funded project DECIPHER (2021-2024).

Prof. Dr. Timothy L. Sellnow

Associate Member, Professor of Communication Studies at Clemson University with research interests in risk and crisis communication; with research projects for the Department of Homeland Security, United States Department of Agriculture, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Environmental Protection Agency, the United States Geological Survey, and the World Health Organization. He has served as a consultant to the National Academy of Sciences, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, International Food and Information Council, and the Food and Drug Administration. He has co-authored seven books on risk and crisis communication and has published numerous peer-reviewed journal articles. He was a Mercator Fellow in the DFG-funded project DECIPHER (2021-2024).

Dr. phil. Ngoc-Son Le

Associate Member, PhD (2025) in Communication Science at Ilmenau University of Technology on disaster communication in the Philippines and Vietnam. He is co-author of the first book on crisis communication in Vietnamese (with Martin Löffelholz) and founder of Berlin Crisis Solutions, a consulting firm specializing in crisis management. His research focuses on risk and crisis communication management, de-westernization and socio-political approaches. He is a member of the advisory board of AlertHub (COST Action), a network for disaster warning communication.

Dr. phil. Yi Xu

Associate Member, PhD (2023) in Communication Science at TU Ilmenau, is Assistant Professor (Lecturer) of Media at Lancaster University Leipzig. Her research focuses on multimodal framing, visual journalism, strategic political communication, and risk and crisis communication. From 2021 to 2024, she was a research associate at TU Ilmenau in the project "DECIPHER - Deciphering the Pandemic Public Sphere", funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), where she was responsible for the cross-national analysis of crisis communication through press releases and social media by governments and health institutions in six European countries and the United States.