Birke Pfeifle

Birke Pfeifle is a PhD candidate at the Center for Security Studies (CSS) at ETH Zurich. Birke holds a MSc degree in Social and Economic Data Science and a BA in Politics and Public Administration, both from the University of Konstanz, Germany. Her research interests revolve around armed conflict, humanitarian aid, and peacekeeping by leveraging spatial and remote sensing data using quantitative methods and data science.

In her PhD, she focuses on the use of satellite-derived data to study the targeting of civilian infrastructure in war. This follows her Master’s thesis, in which she used deep learning to detect armed conflict damages in open-source satellite imagery. Her research is related to the Remote Monitoring of Armed Conflicts project, which is a cooperation between the CSS and the EcoVision Lab at ETH Zurich and aims at enhancing the ICRC’s early warning capabilities. For her Bachelor’s thesis, she conducted a disaggregated study on the effect of peacekeeping presence on attacks against aid workers in Sudan.

Prior to joining the CSS, Birke gained work experience with the Global Costs of Violence project (University of Konstanz & Stanford University) and interned as a project associate at the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Aid (OCHA), Amnesty International Germany, and at the German Society for International Cooperation (GIZ).