Meet Dr. Sophia Moskalenko

Dr. Sophia Moskalenko is Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Latvia. Her current research and administrative positions span the international landscape: she is an appointed expert consultant for the European Commission, a Technical Team Member for the NATO Science and Technology Organization (STO), and a Research Fellow at both ARTIS International and Georgia State University. She shapes the discipline through her role as associate editor of  Motivation and Emotion and contributes to the transmission of psychological knowledge through the authorship of nine books. Her expertise encompasses the motivational roots of extreme and escalating social behavior that can manifest as terrorism for one and martyrdom for the next.

 Dr. Sophia Moskalenko was born and raised in Kyiv, Ukraine, where she witnessed the deliberate mass identity manipulation performed by the Soviet Union to enforce social conformity and compliance. Inspired to understand such social phenomena, she moved to the U.S. and embarked on her academic journey as a Bachelor's student at  Bryn Mawr College, majoring in Psychology and Mathematics. After graduating magna cum laude in 1999, she enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania to complete her Master's in Social Psychology and later, in 2004, her Ph.D. in Social Psychology and Clinical Psychology. 

After earning her Ph.D.,  Dr. Sophia Moskalenko spent over a decade as a Research Fellow at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), where she began the empirical study of radicalization that would come to define her career. This period also included a postdoctoral fellowship with the Department of Homeland Security's Science and Technology Directorate and a research fellowship at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where her work extended into the psychology of interrogation and group violence. She increasingly used this growing expertise to inform policy as well as scholarship: as principal of Moskalenko Research and Consulting, she served as an expert witness in court hearings for high-profile offenses involving terrorism, political violence, and hate crimes. She designed state-commissioned research studies and compiled theoretical frameworks to inform intelligence for the Department of Defense, Department of Energy, Department of Homeland Security, and Department of State. From 2020 to 2024, she served as a Programme Management Specialist at the United Nations' Counter-Terrorism Hub for Behavioral Insights in Doha, where she led international working groups on radicalization in military forces and briefed Member State representatives on prevention and resilience. 

Across this trajectory, Dr. Sophia Moskalenko's research inquiries have developed and diverged in character while maintaining an underlying commitment to curiosity. With Clark McCauley, she developed the mechanisms of political radicalization and, later, the two-pyramids model distinguishing radical opinion from radical action. As radicalization migrated to the online world, she analyzed how it morphed into conspiracy theories, incel ideology, and QAnon. More recently, she has turned to the narratives that often underpin beliefs: fairy tales, folklore, and the stories cultures tell in wartime. In collaboration with Arie Kruglanski, she recently proposed a theoretical framework for the dynamic of two common motivational roots underlying these and many more social phenomena- the fundamental human need to feel significant and its counterpart, the need to feel awe. 

Moreover, ever since the beginning of her academic endeavours, Dr. Sophia Moskalenko has embraced the role of teacher, delivering courses at the University of Pennsylvania, Bryn Mawr College, and now the University of Latvia, including Political Psychology, Social Psychology, Cultural Psychology, and Psychology of Extremism and Violence.