I am Assistant Professor of Political Behavior and Digital Media in the Department of Political Science at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, and part of the university’s Digital Society Initiative. Before joining the University of Zurich in April 2020, I was Assistant Professor of Computational Social Science at the Center for Data and Methods in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Konstanz, Germany. I hold a PhD in Computational Social Science from ETH Zurich and was a postdoctoral researcher at the Graduate Institute Geneva and the University of Maryland.

The main focus of my research group is on the study of digital democracy, i.e., the implications of digital technology for politics and democratic processes. More specifically, we are interested in how digital communication and news platforms together with new ways of digital participation change individual political behavior. In addition, we investigate how these changes then impact political communication and political processes. And, lastly, we try to tackle specific policy problems related to the digital transformation where our research can provide evidence-driven recommendations to civil society and political stakeholders. In our projects, we leverage experimental and observational data from digital media, automated text classification approaches using state-of-the-art machine learning approaches as well as surveys and survey experiments. Together with colleagues, I have also developed and currently maintain a number of software packages for data analysis and visualization that are available as open source tools to the research community.

I am currently working on a new research project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation that aims to improve the quality of public discourse (Improving Public Discourse). This is joint work with colleagues at the Digital Democracy Lab, at ETH Zurich and at UCL and a continuation of prior work we did to support the work of the Public Discourse Foundation to counter online hate speech (StopHateSpeech). Together with colleagues in communication, computer and political science, I also have a project on measuring the impact of the digital transformation on preferences, attitudes and behaviors (DigiVox). Supported by a DIZH infrastructure grant, we have established a new Swiss national survey panel on questions related to digitalization. I am also a member of the executive board of the Population Research Center (PRC) of University of Zurich. Please refer to Research for further details, to my CV for more information on my background and to Publications for a list of my academic publications. I can also be found on Google Scholar, ResearchGate, Academia and Web of Science.