Graduate student affiliates
Peter Andringa
Peter Andringa is a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford (Exeter College), where he is studying an MSc in Social Science of the Internet at the Oxford Internet Institute (2021-22) and a master of Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government (2022-23). He is interested in the intersection of journalism, platform policy, and law, exploring how structural conditions of the internet facilitate or inhibit accountability journalism. He studied at UNC-Chapel Hill (B.A., Journalism & Computer Science) and Duke University as a Robertson Scholar.
Parker Bach
Parker Bach is Ph.D. student and Roy H. Park Fellow in the Hussman School of Journalism and Media at UNC-Chapel Hill. Parker researches online cultural politics, with particular interests in political humor, youth politics, and the American Right. His research incorporates both qualitative and computational methods. Parker holds an MA in Media, Culture, & Technology from the University of Virginia.
Sérgio Barbosa
Sérgio Barbosa is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Social Studies (CES) of the University of Coimbra, where he is part of the program "Democracy in the Twenty-First Century". Since August 2020, Sérgio has been a Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) fellow. In addition, he holds a Digital Humanism junior fellowship at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna. His research interests include the emerging forms of political participation vis-à-vis the possibilities afforded by chat apps, with emphasis on WhatsApp for digital activism and everyday social interactions, focusing on Digital Sociology, Digital Activism, Digital Literacy and Global South.
Ava Francesca Battocchio
Ava Francesca Battocchio is an Information & Media Ph.D. Candidate and University Enrichment Fellow in the College of Communication Arts & Sciences at Michigan State University. Their research employs ethnographic and computational methods to explore how rural, remote and post-industrial community structure and collective identity shape hybrid civic storytelling networks. This work explores how these communities, particularly those underserved by local news and broadband, learn about and organize around challenging social issues.
Keith Baybayon
Keith Baybayon, a dynamic advocate and forward-thinker, is a Strategic Advisory Council member at the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario. Notably, as the youngest member of the IPC Strategic Advisory Council, specializing in Children and Youth in a Digital World, Keith showcases his dedication to enhancing digital literacy and advocating for youth digital rights. His leadership as Chair of the IPC Youth Advisory Council echoes his commitment, guiding young individuals across Ontario in advocating for improved privacy education and digital literacy among youth. As a member of Canada's first-ever Youth Assembly on Digital Rights and Safety, Keith collaborated with peers to craft vital recommendations for Canadian youth digital rights. Keith stands as a passionate advocate and thought leader, driving meaningful change within the intersection of technology, privacy, and youth advocacy. His research interests include youth digital rights, digital literacy enhancement, technology's societal impacts, privacy, and mis/disinformation.
Talia Berniker
Talia Berniker is a Ph.D. student in Communication at Cornell University. Broadly, her research uses qualitative methods to examine how emerging communication technologies are represented in public policy and advertising campaigns.
Sakshi Bhalla
Sakshi Bhalla is a Ph.D. student at the University of Illinois's Institute of Communications Research. She studies news consumption, its interactions with politics and what that can mean for being politically informed. Her work incorporates a variety of qualitative, quantitative and network analytic methods.
Lauren Bridges
Lauren Bridges is a Ph.D. candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. She researches the social and environmental impacts of digital infrastructures. Bridges has published on surveillance infrastructures, digital labor, and moments of digital failure, among other topics. She is co-PI of a two-year grant from the Internet Society. Starting in Fall 2023, Bridges will be fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.
Jaclyn Carroll
Jaclyn Carroll is a Ph.D. student in Sociology at Boston College specializing in deviance, communication, and health culture. She is currently completing a dissertation on wellness influencers and online health coaches, focusing on their migration toward extremist beliefs and their spread of institutional distrust and covid-era misinformation. Her work interrogates new frontiers of expertise and the limitations of platform regulation.
Diana Casteel
Diana Casteel is a PhD candidate at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her areas of interest include political discourse, conservative news cultures, critical disinformation, and the social construction of knowledge. She is currently working on her dissertation which explores the discursive online communities constructed by female conservative political influencers and self-identified journalists using a critical interpretivist perspective.
Jaylexia Clark
Jaylexia Clark is a PhD Candidate and 2022-2023 Fulbright recipient in the Department of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame. Her primary research interests are, structural racial and gender inequality, platform work, and digital entrepreneurship. Currently, she is investigating the experiences of female digital entrepreneurs and platform workers in Accra, Ghana. This project is a part of her ongoing research which seeks to bridge the gap between theories on gendered racial capitalism and platform capitalism.
Carl Colglazier
Carl Colglazier is a PhD student in Technology and Social Behavior at Northwestern University. Carl studies sociotechnical systems and their impact on public discourse with a particular focus on decentralized social networks like Mastodon.
Nicole Cote
Nicole Cote is a Ph.D. student at The Graduate Center of The City University of New York (CUNY). Her research investigates the historical and contemporary entanglements of media, technology, and cultural work that shape how “natural” disasters and other environmental crises are understood in the public sphere, and how they might be refigured.
Elliott Edsall
Elliott Edsall is a first-year PhD student at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities in the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication. His research centers on American political culture, specifically in the realm of right-wing media. He is primarily interested in the way conservative media figures relate themselves to their audiences, and how political and cultural symbols are used to represent outlets' target audiences. He is interested in how political media affects American culture more broadly.
Azza El Masri
Azza El Masri is a doctoral student in Journalism and Media at the University of Texas at Austin. She is a journalist, disinformation expert, and digital security consultant that has worked with independent media organizations, human rights organizations, and journalism students across North Africa and Western Asia (NAWA) to develop and support open-source investigations and fact-checking projects. Her research interests sit at the intersection of media, technology and human rights.
Fatima Fairfax
Fatima G. Fairfax is a PhD student and NASEM Ford Foundation Pre-doctoral Fellow in the Sociology Department at Duke University. With a background in measurement and evaluation, Fairfax is interested in how the measurement decisions underlying large scale technologies impact various social outcomes. With her dissertation, she specifically focuses on the implications in the healthcare sector. She aims to investigate if emergent healthcare technologies, from personal health devices to AI assisted clinical work, mitigate or exacerbate existing racialized health inequities.
Kim Fernandes
Kim Fernandes is a joint doctoral candidate in Anthropology & Education at the University of Pennsylvania. As a researcher, writer and educator, they are interested in when and how the body meets and moves through the world. Their current research, emerging from their dissertation project, lies at the intersections of disability, data and governance.
Margaret E. Foster
Margaret E. Foster (Maggie) is a Ph.D. student in Communication at Cornell University. Her research interests include gender-based violence, epistemic (in)justice, online creator economies, aspirational aesthetics, and queer theory. Prior to Cornell, she completed her MA in Media & Communication at UNC Chapel Hill, where she studied the #MeToo movement.
Shedrick Garrett
Shedrick Garrett is a Ph.D. student in the Developmental Psychology program at UNC-Chapel Hill. He received his B.S. in Psychology and Neuroscience with an area of emphasis in Behavioral Neuroscience from West Virginia University. Garrett's program of research explores the role of digital media on positive youth development and socialization experiences.
Akriti Gaur
Akriti Gaur is an Indian lawyer currently pursuing a J.S.D. at Yale Law School where she also serves as a Tutor in Law. She obtained her LL.M. degree from Yale Law School in 2022. Akriti is a Resident Fellow at the Yale Information Society Project and a research affiliate with the Yale Genocide Studies Program (Mass Atrocities in the Digital Era Project). Before coming to Yale, Akriti was a policy advisor and an independent researcher focusing on technology and human rights in India.
Nicholas Gerstner
Nicholas Gerstner is a doctoral researcher in the Department of Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He researches culture, media, and technology, with particular attention to the cultural politics of common sense. Nicholas' current research traces a techno-cultural history of “polarization” that describes how an idea once limited to the study of electromagnetism has become a common and apparently obvious way to describe society.
Rohan Grover
Rohan Grover is a PhD student at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. His research focuses on how human-data relations are constructed and (de)stabilized through technology policy and platform governance. He holds an MA in Media, Culture, and Communication from NYU and a BS in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania.
Kamile Grusauskaite
Kamile Grusauskaite is a Ph.D. Candidate at the Institute for Media Studies at KU Leuven, Belgium. She was previously a visiting doctorate researcher at Yale Sociology. Her research lies at the intersection of media and cultural sociology. She has written about conspiracy theories, online 'deviance', online subcultures, platform politics, and mechanisms of online socialization. Her work was published in journals like Social Media + Society, New Media and Society and Public Understanding of Science.
Ståle Grut
Ståle Grut (M.A. University of Amsterdam) is a doctoral research fellow at the University of Oslo. His research interests include journalism, platforms, social media, digital open source investigations, and technology. Routledge will publish his book, "Evaluating Digital Sources in Journalism: An Introduction to Digital Source Criticism", in 2024.
Namita Gupta
Namita Gupta is a doctoral student at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her research lies at the intersection of print and digital public sphere, where she aims to study the impact of new technologies on social and political discourse in popular culture. Particularly, she is interested in examining nationalism and resistance in new media publics.
Hunter Hinson
Hunter Hinson is a Shirley Scholar at the University of Oxford, where he is pursuing an MSc in Social Science of the Internet at the Oxford Internet Institute (2023-24). His research focuses on how violence, hate, and political radicalization are promoted online through computational propaganda and other emerging technologies like generative AI. He holds a BA in Communication and Political Science from the University of Southern California.
Edith Hollander
Edith Hollander is a graduate researcher in the Department of Journalism and Media at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research broadly focuses on the intersections of markets and civic engagement in digital media and tech industries. She currently hold a position as a Graduate Student Fellow at the Center for Media Engagement at UT Austin and have previously worked as a research assistant at reproductive rights organization NARAL Pro-Choice America, where she studied anti-abortion movement tactics and disinformation campaigns, and at Princeton’s Bridging Divides Initiative, where she used open-source tools to monitor acts of political violence.
Sudhamshu Hosamane
Sudhamshu Hosamane is a first-year PhD student in Information Science at Rutgers University- New Brunswick. He is interested in studying and modelling human reactions to user-generated content on the internet and has had a longstanding interest in keeping the internet safe and accessible. His current research interests are in social media experiments, online disinformation campaigns, crowdsourcing information, adaptive experiments, studying misinformation on private messaging channels.
Gabriella Hulsey
Gabriella is a 5th year PhD candidate in the UNC Chapel Hill Philosophy Department. She works primarily on normative ethics and value theory, with intersections in social philosophy and epistemology.
Heesoo Jang
Heesoo Jang is a Ph.D. student at the Hussman School of Journalism and Media at UNC-Chapel Hill. Before coming to UNC-Chapel Hill, she worked at SNU FactCheck Center, the first and only fact-checking platform in South Korea. Through her research, she aims to address the multifaceted impacts of AI systems and digital platforms on people and society, focusing on the aspects of politics, power, and ethics. She is passionate about her research because of its implications for democracy.
Daniel Johnson
Daniel Johnson is a Ph.D. student and Roy H. Park Fellow in the Hussman School of Journalism and Media at UNC-Chapel Hill. He was a journalist with the U.S. Army in Iraq in 2016-2017, has worked in public relations, and has written for Slate, The Hill, and Task and Purpose. His current research focuses are on how social media is being used for positive mental health purposes, and on how information warfare tactics are being used domestically and internationally.
Patrick R. Johnson
Patrick R. Johnson is the Director of Student Media and teaching assistant professor of journalism in the Diederich College of Communication at Marquette University. He is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Iowa whose work centers on finding a pathway toward more just and equitable futures in journalism and media practice. He focuses his time on understanding how news literacy, journalism education, and journalism practice intersect. Patrick is also deeply passionate about teaching and the role of journalism schools in the professionalization of their students. LGBTQ advocacy is core to his personal mission and identity.
Evan R. Jones
Evan R. Jones is a Ph.D. student at UNC-Chapel Hill. His research investigates space, place, and abandonment as communication phenomena. He is currently writing a dissertation on the adaptive reuse of decommissioned shipping containers and the processes of placemaking.
Kaitlin Joshua
Kaitlin Joshua is a third-year doctoral student in Department of Sociology at UNC Chapel Hill and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. She is broadly interested in reproductive health, mental health, culture, and media. Her current projects examine the intersection of culture and reproductive health outcomes.
Ana Jovanovic-Harrington
Ana Jovanovic-Harrington is a PhD candidate at Dublin City University School of Communications. Her research explores the media changes that paralleled regime changes from democracy to autocracy in Hungary, Poland, and Serbia from 2010 and onwards. Ana holds a master's degree in political science from the University of Bologna, and a bachelor's degree in French language and literature from the University of Sarajevo.
Alexis Shore
Alexis Shore is a PhD Candidate in the Division of Emerging Media Studies at Boston University. Drawing on frameworks from communication, law, and policy, her work seeks to enhance privacy and free expression within socio-technical systems ranging from legacy messaging platforms to the metaverse. Currently, she is completing her dissertation on screenshot collection and sharing of interpersonal digital messages, using experimental and traditional legal methods to understand the privacy harms enabled by these behaviors and propose solutions for design and policy.
Dyuti Jha
My name is Dyuti, and I am a second-year PhD student at the Brian Lamb School of Communication, Purdue University. My areas of interest are situated along three interrelated tracks: a) the politics of online toxicity, b) the formation, maintenance, and functioning of online communities in the Global South, and c) computational communication research methods.
Stephanie Kaczynski
Stephanie Kaczynski is a Royster Fellow and PhD student in the Department of Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is also pursuing UNC’s Graduate Certificates in Participatory Research and Cultural Studies. Her work centers the biopolitical and colonial relationship between mobility and the nation-state, focusing on the ways marginalized communities resist police racism.
Zarine Kharazian
Zarine Kharazian is a PhD student in the Department of Human-Centered Engineering at the University of Washington, where she works at the Center for an Informed Public. Her research focuses on how online communities across a variety of platforms govern and are governed as they navigate disinformation, cyber-enabled influence operations, and related online harms.
Isaac Kimmel
Isaac Kimmel is a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of Notre Dame. Isaac’s research synthesizes insights from cultural sociology, legislative studies, and political communication to advance our understanding of the evolution of social problems in American public discourse. Isaac’s dissertation relies on qualitative analysis of 2020 congressional candidates’ Twitter accounts to illuminate the influence of political pressures on COVID-19 as a cultural object. Isaac holds an MA in sociology from Notre Dame and a BA in philosophy from the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. He anticipates finishing his PhD in 2023.
Robin Lange
Robin Lange is a third year PhD student working with Dr. Brooke Foucault Welles at Northeastern University. Her research interests include covering online hate speech and leadership in teams. Her current project includes understanding how hate speech impacts entire communities, and that by studying vicarious victimization, we can better understand the harm of hate speech and how community based interventions can reduce its harm. Robin is also working on a collaboration with igraph and Women in Network Science to study leadership in open-source communities.
Yena Lee
Yena Lee is a Ph.D. candidate in the Media, Technology, and Society program at Northwestern School of Communication. She is a member of Digital Apothecary Lab and an affiliate of Center for Latinx Digital Media and The Center for Race and Digital Studies. She is interested in studying the emerging forms and processes of networked social movement and the technological, political, and organizational conditions that enable or challenge the rise of such movements.
Rebecca (Becca) Lewis
Becca Lewis is a PhD candidate in Communication at Stanford University, an incoming Dissertation Fellow at the Stanford’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research, and a Graduate Fellow at the Stanford Cyber Policy Center. Her research has been published in academic journals including New Media & Society, Social Media + Society, and American Behavioral Scientist.
Lan Li
Lan Li is a Ph.D. student at UNC-Chapel Hill’s Department of Information and Library Science. Her research explores how technologies such as AI and online labor platforms shape how we find and conduct work, and its implications for workers and skill development. Prior to joining UNC-Chapel Hill, Lan worked as a programmer developing digital learning tools.
Benjamin Listyg
Benjamin Listyg is a PhD candidate in the Industrial-Organizational Psychology Department at the University of Georgia. His substantive research interests primarily revolve around improving how workers find occupations that match their interests and skillset. His methodological interests focus on Item Response Theory (IRT) modeling, mixed-effect modeling, and applied graph theory.
Dien Luong
Dien Luong is an upcoming PhD student in Communication and Media at the University of Michigan. He has held fellowship positions at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore and the Ash Center at the Harvard Kennedy School. Dien is also interested in researching Big Tech-government relations, online censorship and the media landscape in Southeast Asia.
Alphoncina Lyamuya
Alphoncina Lyamuya is a Ph.D. student at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, University of Southern California. Her research is centered on the intersection of digital technologies, transnational governance, and inequality. She focuses on the use of automated decision-making systems, data science techniques, and other digital infrastructures by governments and humanitarian agencies in migration management and border control.
Daniel Malmer
Daniel Malmer is a Ph.D. student and Roy H. Park fellow in the Media and Communication program at UNC-Chapel Hill. He uses computational methods to study online radicalization, extremism, and conspiracy theories. Prior to UNC, Dan had a long career in software development in Silicon Valley. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a master’s degree in Computer Science from Stanford University.
Zelly Martin
Zelly Martin is a graduate research assistant at the Center for Media Engagement and a current Ph.D. candidate in Journalism and Media at the University of Texas at Austin. She graduated with an M.A. in Journalism and Media from the University of Texas at Austin and a B.A. in Feminist Studies from Southwestern University. Her research focuses on disinformation and data surveillance, particularly as they exacerbate inequality of marginalized communities.
Danilo Reuben-Matamoros
Danilo Reuben-Matamoros is a Ph.D. student at the University of Leeds School of Media and Communication. His current research focuses on online civility. Prior research interests include social media and the ethnographic study of advertising in Costa Rica. Danilo is a former lecturer of sociology and social science research methods at the University of Costa Rica’s Schools of Sociology, Public Health, and Library and Information Sciences.
Ethan McAndrews
Ethan McAndrews is a Yenching Scholar at Peking University, where he is studying an MA in International Politics. He is interested in the intersection of international relations, culture, and technology, primarily exploring how states shape the conditions of digital culture and communication within modern society. He studied at Indiana University Bloomington (B.A., International Relations & East Asian Studies) and Nanjing University as a Boren Scholar.
Broderick McDonald
Broderick McDonald is an Associate Fellow at Kings College London's International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR) examining extremism, terrorism, and disinformation across the ideological spectrum. Outside of this, he is a Fellow with the Aspen Institute UK and an Associate Member of Chatham House. Brody previously served as a Policy Advisor to the Government of Canada and was a fellow with the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations (UNAOC). He currently serves on the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT)'s Independent Advisory Committee, the Aspen Institute UK's RLF Advisory Board, and the GLOCA Board of Advisors
Sean Rutherford McEwan
Emily Mendelson
Emily Mendelson is a doctoral student in Interpersonal Communication at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She is interested in how individuals make sense of their relationships and communicate about their relationships to others. More specifically, Emily researches communication during sexual encounters, mediated displays of public intimacy, and how individuals understand love and care.
Brooke Molokach
Brooke Molokach is a PhD student in Communication at the University of Delaware. Her research centers on affective polarization, motivated reasoning, and the role of intellectual humility in reducing misinformation beliefs, moral disengagement, and dehumanization of political opponents. She is also interested in the narrative-based mechanisms of disinformation and how these narrative features can exploit the salience of group identity. Brooke holds an M.A. in International Affairs from American University and a B.A. in English from Yale University.
Ayana Monroe
Ayana Monroe is a 1st year Ph.D. student at the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science. Her current research focuses on increasing the transparency of systems that reduce friction in the everyday lives of various users while also creating and expanding ways in which users can interact or participate in their creation. In addition to the creation of such systems, she interrogates existing systems while also addressing inequities that may be present in them.
Roxana Muenster
Roxana Mika Muenster is a PhD student in the graduate field of Communications at Cornell University. Her work focuses on social movements, the far-right and digital communication. Currently, she is researching lifestyle politics on the far-right and their role in the online spread of ideology. She has a background in journalism, including as the Marjorie Deane Fellow at the Economist, and has worked as a researcher at the FU Berlin, the LSE and Cornell University.
Sarah Nguyễn
Sarah Nguyễn is a PhD student at the University of Washgton's Information School, where she also received a Master in Library and Information Science. They investigate memory and trauma, problematic information, and information disorder among immigrant and refugee diaspora, and non-English communities.
Nishant
Engaged in the dynamic field of Biotechnology at Delhi Technological University, Nishant is currently undertaking a captivating journey where the intersections of science, technology, and societal imperatives unfold. Their fervor for Drug Design, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, and Computational Neuroscience has led to collaborative endeavors with accomplished individuals investigating the neural underpinnings of learning, cognitive science, and the transformative impact of AI in medical diagnostics.
Enrique Nunez-Mussa
Enrique Núñez-Mussa is a Ph.D. student in the Information and Media program at Michigan State University and is a Fulbright scholar. He is an external graduate student affiliated with the Center for Latinx Digital Media of Northwestern University. His research interests are journalism's societal function, authority, discourse, and norms.
Pratik Nyaupane
Pratik Nyaupane is a doctoral student in communication at the University of Southern California in the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, where he broadly looks at the intersection between society, technology, and politics. As a graduate researcher, Pratik has been exploring the ways in which technology mediates interactions through state and corporate power. He also looks at the digitization practices of citizenship, migration, and borders and how digital technologies have an impact on democratic cultural and political processes. He holds an undergraduate degree from Arizona State University in Informatics.
Agustin Orozco
Agustin Orozco is a Southern Futures Fellow at UNC Chapel Hill, where he is pursuing a B.S in Psychology with a Minor in Data Science. He is interested in how algorithms are tangible and intangible harming marginalized communities, specifically looking at predictive models and search engines. Currently, his research focuses on how models reinforce narratives that systematically oppress marginalized people. He is examining cases of predictive policing in the South, as well as, the conceptualizations that these models create based on the American South.
Kara Ortiga
Kara Ortiga is currently a PhD Candidate at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. She is interested in how and why online users or audiences become entangled with disinformation narratives. She finished her Master of Digital Communication and Culture at the University of Sydney and was a feature writer for Esquire, CNN Philippines, and Vice Asia.
Ellen Perleberg
Ellen Perleberg is a Master of Science in Library Science student at UNC-Chapel Hill and the co-principal investigator of the Yallah Y'all Queer Jewish Linguistics lab at the University of Washington in Seattle. Her current research focuses on "algospeak" and other forms of digital language innovation, especially in relation to digital labor practices.
Contia’ Prince
Contia' Prince is a two-time graduate of Elon University, where she completed her B.A. in Cinema & Television Arts and her M.A. in Interactive Media. She is currently a Park Doctoral Fellow and CITAP affiliate in the Hussman School of Media & Journalism interested in the way historical and contemporary narratives of “defectiveness” impact perceptions of contemporary black women. She is also interested in how black women navigate these narratives while expressing themselves through changes in their physical appearance.
Megan Rim
Megan Rim is a PhD Candidate in American Culture and Digital Studies at the University of Michigan. Her research interests broadly look at race and digital technology with specific attention to social movements, surveillance, infrastructures, and algorithmic bias. Her work is theoretically and methodologically inspired by Black and Women of Color Feminisms, Feminist STS, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, and Critical Data Studies.
Alex Rochefort
Alex Rochefort is a PhD Candidate in the Division of Emerging Media Studies at Boston University’s College of Communication. He is currently working on a dissertation that uses theories of the policymaking process to explain the emergence of digital platform regulation as a public concern in the United States. His broader research interests include platform governance, tech policy, and human rights. Alex has held fellowships with Freedom House and Ranking Digital Rights. In 2022 he participated in the Oxford Media Policy Summer Institute.
Nishant Sahdev
Nishant Sahdev is a research scholar at Delhi Technological University, New Delhi, India. He is doing his work on monetary policy & flow. He keeps a good knowledge of South Asia History and the Indian constitution. He has received various scholarships from the government of India.
Sananda Sahoo
Sananda Sahoo is a Ph.D. candidate in Media Studies at the Faculty of Information and Media Studies, the University of Western Ontario, Canada. She looks at the intersections of public, public space, and digital infrastructures. Her previous research includes political posters and platforms, Internet shutdowns, sites of violence in the digital sphere, data imaginaries in colonial and democratic India, and colonial narratives in photographs and memoirs by women.
Mariana Sánchez Santos
Mariana Sánchez Santos is a Ph.D. student in the School of Communication at American University. She holds a BA in International Relations from ITAM in Mexico City and a Master of Arts in Political Communication from the University of Leeds, UK. Her Ph.D. research focuses on political communication, elections, and technology in Latin America.
Arjun Sawhney
Arjun Sawhney is a Ph.D. student in Philosophy at Queen's University at Kingston. He is currently studying jurisprudence, political philosophy, and the social impacts of artificial intelligence. Arjun's work explores many areas in philosophy and has most recently focused on the impact of policing algorithms on Indigenous communities.
Rebecca Scharlach
Rebecca Scharlach is an international PhD Candidate in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a core member of the ERC-funded research project DigitalValues. Her dissertation, supervised by Limor Shifman, focuses on the construction of values by social media platforms. Broadly, her research critically examines the intersection between platform governance and society.
Reed Van Schenck
Reed Van Schenck is a Ph.D candidate in Communication and Rhetoric at the University of Pittsburgh and an assistant debate coach at the William Pitt Debating Union. Their research applies critical-cultural studies to understand reactionary digital networks. They are currently working on their dissertation which interrogates the decline of the Alt-Right after 2017 and the ideological effects of platform governance in the United States.
Jessica Shaw
Jessica Shaw is a Ph.D. student and a Roy H. Park fellow at the Hussman School of Journalism and Media at UNC-Chapel Hill. Jessica's current research explores the public understanding and ethics of data privacy in strategic communication efforts, such as advertisements, disclaimers, and PR initiatives. Previously, she worked as a journalist and in public relations.
Sam Shear
Sam Shear is a graduate student in Wake Forest University's Department of Communication. He is interested in the political and epistemological underpinnings of sociotechnical structures, such as algorithms and minimalistic, techno-libertarian logics.
Felix M. Simon
Felix M. Simon is a journalist, communication researcher, and doctoral student at the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) and a Knight News Innovation Fellow at Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism. He also works as a research assistant at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (RISJ) and regularly writes and comments on technology, media, and politics for various international outlets. His research seeks to understand the structural implications of artificial intelligence, including forms of generative AI such as ChatGPT and DALL:E, for news organizations' gatekeeping processes—the production and distribution of news—and the public arena.
Yarden Skop
Yarden Skop is a PhD researcher. Her dissertation research will explore relationships between digital news and journalistic publishers and large platform companies, using case studies in which machine learning is used to automate content moderation and fact checking. Before starting her graduate studies, Yarden was a journalist in Israel for more than a decade.
Thomas Struett
Thomas Struett is a communication PhD student at American University. He is also the research director at the Digital Trade and Data Governance Hub located at George Washington University. His research has focused on data governance, folk theories of algorithms, and internet governance.
Julianna Surkin
Julianna Surkin is a scholar at UNC-Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science majoring in Information Science and Computer Science. After being inspired by a Cyberlaw course at the London School of Economics and Political Science, Julianna expanded her areas of study beyond software and experience design to include many fascinating aspects of technology regulation. Her research focuses on the interdisciplinary study of design and regulation, uncovering how the intersection of platform architecture, dark patterns, and artificial intelligence pose a threat to individual autonomy and democratic processes.
Naa Korkoi Tacki
Naa Korkoi is a PhD student with the Emerging Media Studies unit at the Department of Communication at Boston University. She aims to leverage AI and/or nostalgia in factchecking mis/disinformation on social media. With professional backgrounds in Copyediting, Journalism (TV), Advertising, Production, and Factchecking, she expects to apply the skills honed in these professions to her cumulative skills to executing her doctoral study projects.
Li Qian Tay
Li Qian Tay is a Ph.D. student in the School of Psychological Science at the University of Western Australia. His research explores how different types of misinformation and interventions affect individuals’ cognition and behaviour. He also has broad interests in causal inference and computational modelling.
Zari Taylor
Zari Taylor is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is a critical platform studies and cultural studies scholar whose research lays at the intersection of popular culture, social media, and beauty capital. Her dissertation explores the gendered and radicalized implications of beauty capital within the social media influencer industry - specifically on Tik Tok. She is also an opinion writer and columnist with The Daily Tar Heel.
Shu Wan
Shu Wan is currently matriculated as a doctoral student in history at the University at Buffalo. As a digital and disability historian, he serves in the editorial team of Digital Humanities Quarterly and Nursing Clio.
Lingyu Wang
Lingyu Wang is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Information and Library Sciences at UNC Chapel Hill. He studies community archives of social movement artworks and documents, examining their relations to identities, public memories, and perceptions of the living space. He works in the intersection of library and information science, art history, critical media studies, and urban studies. In praxes, he also builds digital libraries and databases with people across disciplines of LIS, arts, and humanities.
Lucas Wright
Lucas is a graduate student in the Department of Communication at Cornell University. His research focuses on how online platforms regulate the behavior of users, especially through automated, algorithmic interventions. Prior to joining CAT Lab, Lucas conducted research with non-profits including the Dangerous Speech Project and the Global Disinformation Index. He has a MSc in Social Science of the Internet from the University of Oxford and a BA in Political Science from American University.
Sarah Whitmarsh
Sarah Whitmarsh is a PhD student and Roy H. Park Fellow at the Hussman School of Journalism and Media. Her research interests include collective action and social change, especially on abortion and reproductive justice. Prior to UNC, she worked as a communication professional in international development and reproductive health and spent nearly 15 years designing, implementing, and evaluating advocacy and communication strategies.
Adrian Wong
Adrian Wong is a Ph.D. candidate in the Institute of Communications Research, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He grew up in Murrieta, CA, as the third child in a bi-racial family of 6 with a Chinese-immigrant father and a white, 6th generation Californian mother. His Fulbright-Hays supported dissertation research focuses on digital transformation policies and initiatives in Chile and their implications for regional socioeconomic inequality and South-South digital infrastructure development.