Marika Landau-Wells

About

Marika Landau-Wells was formerly the W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellow at the Hoover Institution from 2021-2022.

Landau-Wells is an assistant professor in the Travers Department of Political Science at the University of California–Berkeley. She received her PhD in political science from MIT and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. Her research is broadly concerned with the effects of cognitive processes—including perception, attention, concept formation, and memory—on political behavior. Her current project investigates the ways in which the psychological and neurological underpinnings of threat perception influence decision making. She employs a variety of research methods in her work, including experiments, archival data analysis, and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). During the fellowship year at the Hoover Institution, Dr. Landau-Wells completed a book manuscript on the role of threat perception in the making of national security policy.