Elisa Militaru

Elisa Militaru is currently reading Psychology at Christ’s College, Cambridge. She has received the Economic Social Research Council Exchange Studentship to undergo her MPhil and PhD and she is co-funded by the Nokia Bell Labs.

Her interests lie within the field of computational social psychology and she is currently focusing on the mechanisms of trust and empathy. Together with the Social Dynamics lab at Nokia Bell, she is investigating the geographical distribution of empathy and moral outrage using social media data. Elisa is generally interested in morality, emotion contagion and pro-social behaviour.

Before coming to the University of Cambridge, she received the Experimental Psychology Society award to conduct research in the field of associative learning with Dr Nicola Byrom in the Experimental Psychology Lab at King’s College London. Elisa also collaborated with Dr Robin Murphy and the Computational Psychopathology Lab at the University of Oxford to look at learning and anxiety. Previously, Elisa collaborated with Dr Sophie Sowden and Dr Geoffrey Bird at the MRC Centre for Social Genetic & Developmental Psychiatry, King’s College London to develop a novel measure of social conformity to help distinguish between acceptance and compliance. Currently, she is collaborating with Dr Wijnand van Tilburg from King’s College London to model trust using interactive games.

Elisa holds a BSc in Psychology from King’s College London, where she graduated with a first, receiving the Dean’s award for outstanding performance at King’s College London.

Outside of the research group, Elisa is the Head of Research and co-founder of the startup Advance Careers, where she has developed cognitive games to be implemented in the graduate recruitment process. When she is not in the lab, she is probably travelling or whitewater rafting on a freezing river.