Rand El Zein is Department III’s Research Officer. She coordinates departmental research activities, liaises between scholars and administration, and advises on external cooperations. Before joining MPWIG, she was the research coordinator for the two Leibniz Transfer funding programmes, HISDEMAB and REMOBOKO, at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin (2021–2022). She obtained her doctorate in Communication Studies from Universität Salzburg in Austria (2017–2021), where she wrote her monograph Between Violence, Vulnerability, Resilience and Resistance: Arab Television News on the Experiences of Syrian Women during the Syrian Conflict. She has a Master’s in Media Studies from the American University of Beirut (2013–2015), where she worked as a research assistant (2016–2017).