As a music producer and media artist specializing in interdisciplinary projects, Maral Salmassi has founded and led companies in label management, music distribution, and publishing. She has advised leading brands and institutions on music and cultural initiatives and now advances Zera’s vision at the intersection of research, culture, and social impact.

Taja works at the Zera Institute as an analyst, focusing on the systematic evaluation of digital content. Her work includes analyzing web, social media, and other media data, as well as providing technical support for fact-checked publications.

She holds a B.Sc. and M.Sc. in engineering, with a focus on analytical and numerical methods. This methodological training forms the basis of her work on data-driven evaluations and structured analyses.

Berlin-based photographer and Videographer Markus Nass specializes in portrait, editorial, and lifestyle productions. With over two decades of experience in photography and visual storytelling, he has portrayed numerous leading figures from the worlds of culture, media, and art. At the Zera Institute, Markus oversees multimedia production, encompassing everything from video formats to multimedia campaigns.

Marcus Scheiber is a linguist with research interests in social semiotics, corpus linguistics, critical discourse analysis, and multimodality research. He received his MA from the University of Heidelberg in 2018 with a thesis about internet memes. Since 2020, he has been pursuing a joint PhD project at the University of Vechta and the University of Vienna entitled “The reality construction potential of multimodal communicative units in antisemitic communication, examining internet memes as communication formats in antisemitic communication strategies.

Benjamin Rouda holds a BA in Psychology and Middle Eastern Studies from Tel Aviv University.

His research centers on social psychology, particularly the psychology of extremism and intergroup conflict. He also investigates the radicalization of online communities, with a special focus on incel groups. 

Suneela Maddineni is a data scientist and NLP researcher with a focus on computational analysis of online harmful and antisemitic discourse. She holds a Master’s degree in Data Science from American University, where her work centered on text classification, clustering, and mixed-method approaches to understanding online hate and psychological themes in social media content.

Oksana is a physician-epidemiologist and data scientist with extensive experience in public health research, computational analysis, and bioinformatics. She has worked on open science initiatives and projects that address misleading or fragmented information in high-risk and crisis contexts, such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

Ariella Chmiel is a political scientist working at the intersection of culture, politics, and civic dialogue. As the former CEO of the Literaturhandlung, one of the most significant Jewish cultural institutions in Germany, she was responsible for its strategic and financial development and for its programming, including the conception and moderation of numerous political and cultural events. She is also the co-initiator of Coffee with a Jew, a discussion format that facilitates encounters and promotes a more open exchange about Jewish life. She focuses on the contextualization of political and social issues and their discussion in the public square.