Between 2005 and 2024, Theresa served in the House of Commons as MP for Chipping Barnet. In December 2005, after just seven months in parliament, David Cameron appointed Theresa to his Shadow Cabinet as Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury. As well as working with George Osborne on Conservative economic policy, Theresa led the Opposition scrutiny of the Finance Bills in 2006 and 2007 – this process is a notoriously complex and difficult task but Theresa gained vital concessions from Gordon Brown who was then the Chancellor. At David Cameron’s first reshuffle in July 2007, she gained further promotion and was appointed Shadow Secretary of State for Transport.

Julia is a Research Fellow with the Experimental Government Team (XGT) at the Policy Institute. Before joining the Institute in March 2023, she contributed to research on public preferences on hate speech regulation at the Hertie School in Berlin, as well as on connections between labour conditions and voting, family health, and child behaviour at the Berlin Social Science Centre (WZB).

Julia holds a Master of Public Policy degree from the Hertie School and a BA in History from Kenyon College (USA). Prior to completing her master's, she worked in education for several years in the United States, first as a middle school math teacher and then in education technology. Her research interests proceed in part from her time working in classrooms, particularly around inequality, social stratification, and labour conditions of frontline service providers.

Jon Roozenbeek is a Lecturer in Psychology. As a computational social psychologist, Jon’s research seeks to understand the interplay between modern communication technologies and polarisation, misinformation, and authoritarianism. He covers topics such as human-AI interaction, group identity and ideology building, misinformation and propaganda (especially in Ukraine and Russia), institutional trust, digital technology use, and the psychological drivers of authoritarianism. He has recently published two books: The Psychology of Misinformation (with Sander van der Linden) and Propaganda and Ideology in the Russian-Ukrainian War. Jon’s work has been awarded numerous distinctions, including the 2025 Jim Sidanius Early Career Award from the International Society of Political Psychology (ISPP), the 2024 Rising Star Award from the Association for Psychological Science (APS), and the ISI Highly Cited Researcher recognition. At Psychology, he lectures and supervises students for PBS02 (Social Psychology, Applied Psychology and Individual Differences) and PBS07 (Advanced Topics in Social and Applied Psychology).