Maria Halloran is pursuing a Master's degree in Comparative Democracy at Goethe University. She is a student assistant at the Chair of Methods in Qualitative Empirical Social Research, where she is working on the DFG
project "Smart Authoritarianism? Comparing the Internet Strategies of Authoritarian Regimes." Maria also serves as a Tutor for the course "Introduction to Comparative Democracy" for first year students in her Master's program. Before she began working and studying in Frankfurt, Maria got her undergraduate degrees in Political Science and Business Operations at Indiana University in the United States and spent four years working for a Washington, D.C. based policy research firm.