People
Nejla Asimovic – Assistant Professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy, Georgetown University. Previously, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute for the Study of Citizens and Politics. From Bosnia and Herzegovina, Nejla earned her Ph.D. in Political Science from New York University, where she was also a Research Affiliate at the Center for Social Media and Politics, a role she continues. Her research draws from political psychology and computational social science to examine the interplay between digital technologies and intergroup relations in deeply divided societies globally.
Paul Brown – Director of the Civic Innovation Center and associate clinical professor at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, focused on building SPP’s programs in civic innovation and multi-sector collaborative governance.
Cody Buntain – Assistant Professor, INFO@UMD. He studies social media and how people use online spaces during moments of uncertainty and unrest. His work examines how we make these space more informative, better sources of connection, and more resilient against manipulation. His work is grounded in two use-cases: crisis informatics and political communication, as many questions that arise in times of disaster similarly arise in the lead up to elections and moments of social unrest. Socio-technical solutions to these issues are critical to supporting democratic systems.
Ernesto Calvo – Director of the Interdisciplinary Lab for Computational Social Science (iLCSS) and a Professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland. I research comparative political institutions, social media, political representation, and social networks. My work lies at the intersection of big data, survey experiments, and institutions.
Jennifer Golbeck – Full professor at INFO@UMD. I study social networks, social media, privacy, and security online. I have published four books and over 200 scientific, peer reviewed articles on these topics.
Mallory Harris – A Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Biology and the Institute for Health Computing at the University of Maryland. She obtained her PhD in Biology from Stanford University and was a visiting graduate student at the Center for an Informed Public at the University of Washington. She uses quantitative methods to study the interplay between human behavior and infectious diseases. She has studied the role of perceived biomedical experts as a unique group of anti-vaccine influencers.
Masha Krupenkin – Incoming Assistant Professor in INFO@UMD and currently an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Boston College. I have previously been a faculty fellow at Princeton CSDP and a Visiting Scholar at Microsoft Research. My research uses survey and computational methodologies to study Americans’ political behaviors on a variety of topics, including racial prejudice, immigration, and partisanship. I am currently writing a book about immigrants’ racial attitudes.
Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia – Assistant professor at INFO@UMD. He is interested in problems originating from the interplay between people and computing systems, in the determinants of information quality in cyberspace, and in how information propagates across social networks, with application to the integrity of information in cyberspace and the trustworthiness and reliability of social computing systems.
Julia Mendelsohn – Postdoctoral scholar at the Data Science Institute at the University of Chicago and an incoming assistant professor at INFO@UMD and affiliated with the Department of Government and Politics. She studies natural language processing, political communication, and computational sociolinguistics. Julia has published papers at top-tier venues, including ACL, NAACL, EMNLP, and ICWSM, where she received the Outstanding Methodology award in 2023. Julia completed her PhD at the University of Michigan School of Information and received a BA in Linguistics and MS in Computer Science from Stanford University.
Tiago Ventura – Assistant Professor in Computational Social Science at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy. Before joining Georgetown, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics. I received my Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Maryland, College Park, where I am still a faculty affiliated with the iLCSS. After completing my PhD, I had experience in the industry as a Misinformation Researcher at @Twitter.
Patrick Wu – I am an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at American University. My work lies at the intersection of natural language processing and computational social science. The computational methods I develop address political science topics such as political elite and non-elite ideology, affective polarization, and hateful and abusive speech and memes.
