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.

In my research, I combine a substantive interest in political science with the development and refinement of quantitative methodologies for social science research. In the past years, the main focus of my research has been on understanding the influence of new digital (online) media for political behavior. This includes research on biased media coverage but also on the role of individuals’ perceptions for how such content ultimately affects behavior. My main methodological interests are related to leveraging experimental and observational data from digital media. I am also interested in the use of computational (agent-based) modeling approaches to capture systemic complexity and in the analysis of highly-resolved geographical data. 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 joint project with colleagues at the Digital Democracy Lab and at ETH Zurich that combines natural language processing and machine learning to support the work of the Public Discourse Foundation to counter online hate speech (StopHateSpech). Together with other 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 are establishing a new Swiss national survey panel on questions related to digitalization. I am also a member of the executive board of the new Population Research Center (PRC) of University of Zurich. Further details may also be found under Research. Please refer 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.