Clara Lerch

Clara Lerch

Research Associate (pre-doc)

Kolingasse 14-16
1090 Wien

Clara Lerch is a Ph.D candidate and sows:docs fellow 2025 at the Computational Communication Science Lab at the University of Vienna, under the supervision of Prof. Hajo Boomgaarden.

In her dissertation, Clara examines how political and media debates shape public perceptions of climate migration across three selected EU Member States, combining multilingual corpus analysis, cross-national surveys, and experiments to investigate how different framings influence public attitudes.

She completed her Master’s degree in Transdisciplinary Research in Global Challenges for Sustainability (M.Sc.) within the European University Alliance CHARM-EU, a joint programme of the University of Barcelona, Trinity College Dublin, Utrecht University, the University of Montpellier, and Eötvös Loránd University Budapest.

Prior to starting her Ph.D., she worked as a Research Fellow at AWARD (African Women in Agricultural Research and Development), where she conducted 75 semi-structured interviews with smallholder farmers in Makueni County, Kenya, as part of a Kenyan-European research team, focusing on food security, water management, and gender roles. She also completed the Blue Book traineeship at the European Commission in the Directorate-General for International Partnerships, working in the unit for Sustainable Food Systems and Fisheries.

Research interests:

➥ Automated Text Analysis

➥ Climate Change and Migration

➥ Transdisciplinary Research Approaches