Melissa Baganz

Melissa Baganz is a PhD student at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame, and is committed to understanding the prevalence of violence despite formal peace processes and to exploring how the structure and design of such processes may contribute to ongoing violence. As a certified civil mediator and experienced workshop facilitator, she has spent years mediating disputes and delivering trainings in mediation, conflict transformation, and communication skills.

Melissa brings practical, hands-on expertise through her long-term work with NGOs in both Germany and India. In these roles, she has focused on conflict resolution, peacebuilding, mediation processes, forms of discrimination, and qualitative research methods. Her approach combines academic rigor with grounded field experience.

She holds an M.A. in Intercultural Conflict Management from the Alice Salomon University of Applied Sciences in Berlin, where she was awarded a scholarship by the "Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes" (German Academic Scholarship Foundation). She also holds a B.A. in Area Studies with a focus on South Asia from Humboldt University in Berlin.