The CITAP community warmly congratulates our friend and colleague Professor Deen Freelon on his new appointment with the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School of Communication. Dr. Freelon will be the Allan Randall Freelon Sr. Professor of Communication.
With this transition, Freelon will become a CITAP senior affiliate researcher and continue to work with CITAP faculty, postdoctoral scholars, and graduate students on questions regarding race, identity, and mis- and disinformation. We are excited about his new role as a bridge between the important research at the Annenberg School and CITAP.
We’re deeply grateful to Deen for his role in co-founding CITAP and shaping our shared research agenda over the past three and a half years. In that time, he built the Political and Civic Applications Division (PCAD) team, mentored four postdoctoral research fellows and many more graduate students, and made contributions to open-source research software that support work far beyond our center. Deen’s publications have helped define the field of mis- and disinformation studies. He is a rigorous scientist, a leader in his field, and an academic of international reputation. He is also an amiable colleague whose generosity with mentorship, in particular, is felt far and wide in academia and beyond.
Gary Marchionini said, “I first met Deen more than two decades ago when he was a Stanford undergraduate spending the summer in my lab at UNC. He was a creative and technically savvy contributor and I was delighted when he came to UNC as professor more than a decade later. Deen’s socio-technical perspective on media is inspiring and his contributions to the CITAP community and to the evolving field of social informatics have been foundational. I look forward to continuing to learn from and with him in the years ahead.”
Alice Marwick added, “I’m proud to call Deen a colleague and friend. The work he’s done at CITAP has been foundational to the field, and I expect his future research to be similarly impactful – both in tandem with CITAP and at Penn.”
Daniel Kreiss noted, “It has been an honor to work alongside Deen researching disinformation in the context of social difference and social power – and I am very much looking forward to continuing this work in the years ahead.”
“CITAP has been my main intellectual community since I helped establish it in 2019, and I look forward to continuing to work with my colleagues there after my job transition,” said Freelon.