50+ women to follow in computational social science

This post originally appeared on SAGE Ocean

A little over a week ago, I posted a blog celebrating 39 women in computational social science. We knew there would be so many more amazing researchers to add, and the social science community duly delivered, suggesting plenty of women that should also be celebrated. Therefore, rather fittingly on #AdaLovelaceDay we have  published an updated list. The number has now more than doubled, and we hope that it is a good start for anyone looking for a supervisor for their PhD, or just wanting to see what other doctoral fellows are working on.

There are, of course, hundreds, if not thousands more female researchers either working on their PhD, already advanced in their careers as academics, or carrying out computational research work with societal data within non-profits and other private organisations. And there are even more men, whose remarkable outputs and contributions in this field are similarly critical. We invite you to use this as a start, and comment or tweet any other researchers that you know in this space. At SAGE Ocean, we believe that social science has a critical role to play in shaping the future of society for the better and that researchers sit at the foundation of this. Read more about our mission and goals and how we could help you here.

We realize, that our coverage here is still quite limited to the US, UK and some in Europe and even fewer in Asia and currently none from Africa. We reached out to the computational social science group in Africa and hoping for further insight into the CSS researchers in this region. So watch this space!

University researchers

Agnes Horvat is a Professor at Northwestern and has a varied background in physics, computer science, film, and media, she studies the behavior of crowds and maps the complex network connections in peer-to-peer platforms. Watch her keynote speech at IC2S2 2017 about collective intelligence in crowdfunding.

Amanda Stevenson is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Colorado Boulder. She uses demographic methods to study the impacts of reproductive health policies, and computational methods to study social responses to these policies. Follow her on Twitter @ajeanstevenson

Ancsa Hannak is an Assistant Professor at the Complexity Science Hub Vienna and the Vienna University of Economics and Business. For her 2016 PhD thesis, advised by Northeastern’s David Lazer and Alan Mislove, she developed a few tools and frameworks that allowed her to study and evaluate the extent of personalization in online content. Her current work continues to build upon the analysis of fairness of big data algorithms and gender disparities in online platforms. Follow her on Twitter @ancsaaa3.

Annie Waldherr is an Assistant Professor for Digitized Public Spheres at the University of Münster. In a recent study, Annie and her colleagues evaluated three different techniques to reduce noise in a large corpus of online web pages and found that keyword filtering and automated classification work best. Follow her on Twitter @annie_waldherr.

Barbara McGillivray is a Research Fellow in modern and applied linguistics and a computational linguist at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow at The Alan Turing Institute. In 2013 she published a brilliant book reviewing and over-viewing computational methods for Latin. Her recent research projects focus around methods and tools for computational analysis of Latin corpora. Connect and follow her work on researchgate.

Brooke Foucault Welles is an Assistant Professor at Northwestern University and studies how social networks shape and constraint human behavior. In a recent study with a colleague, she found that visual representations improve problem solving accuracy compared to text and recommends that it is important to match the task with the visual. Brooke has also been a champion and contributor to the development of Volunteer Science, the web-based social lab. Follow her on Twitter @foucaultwelles.

Cecilia Mascolo is a Professor of Mobile Systems at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute for Data Science in London. In a recently published paper, Cecilia and colleagues used large scale data sets to investigate the impact of the London 2012 Olympic Games on the regeneration of East London. Follow her on Twitter @cecim.

Ceren Budak is a Professor at the University of Michigan and researches social networks, news consumption and charity giving. In a recent paper, Ceren and colleagues looked at the effect of a simple design change (adding a level of threading for comments) on engagement with online newspapers. Follow her on Twitter @cerenbudak or Medium: ceren budak.

Chanuki Illushka Seresinhe has just finished her PhD but has already had a fascinating career to date, running her own digital design consultancy in London before returning to academia. She regularly gives talks and presentations and anyone attending Ada Lovelace Day Live, tonight will be able to hear her speak. Follow her @thoughtsymmetry.

Christina Maimone is not exactly an academic researcher, but she has a key role in this ecosystem because she helps researchers working within data science to overcome technical obstacles, and she has done this for more than 10 years. She is definitely the expert of computational social science tools and methods and you can follow her on Twitter @maimonecr.

Claire Cardie is a Professor at Cornell University mainly working on Natural Language Processing, especially the computational analysis and extraction of opinions in online communication. A recent piece of research that attracted my attention is an attempt of Claire and colleagues to create an intelligent machine that can paint! They combined Vision/Graphics and NLP to generate images in a series of steps, pretty much similar to what a human being would do when asked to produce an image of, say, a forest. Follow her on twitter @clairecardie.

Claudia Wagner a Professor in Computer Science at University of Koblenz-Landau and the head of Data Science team at GESIS. One of the papers that attracted my attention was a 2016 study of gender asymmetries in Wikipedia; spoiler alert, there is a big gap. Follow her on Twitter @clauwa.

Cuihua Shen is a Professor at the University of California, Davis, studying social dynamics in digital games and other online communities. In a recent study that attracted my attention, Cuihua explored two massive multiplayer online games to understand whether men advance faster than women. I was very pleasantly surprised— there is NO gap. Follow Cuihua Cindy Shen on Medium.

Diane Litman is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Pittsburgh and co-director of the Intelligent Systems Program. She focuses on artificial intelligence and its application to a variety of areas including linguistics, education, reasoning and behavior. I’ve bookmarked to read one of her latest papers that examines whether speech recognition technologies are any good for evaluating those that are learning a second language. Follow her lab’s latest updates on @LRDC1.

Dong Nguyen is a Research Fellow at The Alan Turing Institute, where she co-runs the NLP Interest Group. In her relatively recent (2017) PhD thesis, for which she won a couple of awards, she develops computational approaches for social media text/content that would enable researchers to get better insights into the social and cultural phenomena. Follow her on Twitter @dongng.

Donna Hoffman is Professor of Marketing at the George Washington School of Business, focusing on areas such as social media, online consumer behavior, and digital marketing trends. She co-founded and co-directed “one of the premiere research centers in the world for the study of electronic commerce” (New York Times). In a recent paper she explores how the Internet of Things is revolutionizing consumer behavior. Follow her on Twitter @profhoff and Medium Donna L. Hoffman.

Elizabeth Bruch an Associate Professor in Sociology and Complex Systems at the University of Michigan, and an External Faculty member at the Santa Fe Institute. She also leads the Computational Social Science Initiative that aims to build new courses and form a collective group of students and faculty who are working in computational methods. In an intriguing recent study, Elizabeth and colleagues used data from online dating sites to model the romantic courtship process. They found that consistently across 4 cities in the US, most people look for mates that are 25% more desirable than themselves. More examples of her work can be found here.

Eszter Hargittai is a Professor at the Institute of Communication and Media Research at the University of Zurich and recently published a paper on the ethics of big data. Her research has been featured in a variety of news outlets and she has received numerous academic awards. Follow her @eszter.

Frauke Kreuter is the Director of the Joint Program in Survey Methodology at the University of Maryland. She is also Adjunct Research Professor at the Institute for Social Research (ISR) at the University of Michigan. Her current research focuses on systematic biases in data and data driven insights; consent to record linkage; use of mobile technology for data collection. She is also co-founder of the Coleridge Initiative with the aim of accelerating data-driven research. You can follow her on Twitter @fraukolos.

Giulia Andrighetto is the Coordinator of the Laboratory of Agent Based Social Simulation in Rome and her research is interdisciplinary and focuses on the nature and dynamics of social norms and the mechanisms fostering their compliance and diffusion. If you want to find out more about why some countries are more honest than others, read one of her recent papers comparing tax evasion tactics in Sweden and Italy. Follow her lab on Twitter @LABSS_CNR.

Helen Margetts is a Professor of Society and Internet and she was the Director of the Oxford Internet Institute until earlier this year. Her research focuses on digital era governance and politics. There is one article that I will definitely read and is quite pertinent to my current role — “The Data Science of Politics”, where she discusses methodologies in political science and how these could be expanded further with tool kits of large scale analysis from data science. Follow her on Twitter @helenmargetts.

Huina Mao is a Liane Russell Fellow at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. In a recent paper with colleagues, she used Natural Language Processing and geospatial clustering to extract place names from housing adverts online and mapped these out to the correct coordinates. Follow her on Twitter @huinamao.

Hyunjin Seo is an Associate Professor at the University of Kansas, specializing in social media, network analysis and strategic communication. She’s had a most interesting life before she became an academic, working as a foreign correspondent for North Korea and other international media outlets. In a 2016 study, she looked at visual propaganda on Facebook and how the Syrian government and the opposition used images to promote their agendas. Follow her on Twitter @HyunjinSeo.

Inês Amaral is an Associate Professor at University of Coimbra and she wrote a chapter on Computational Social Science in the Encyclopedia of Big Data. Follow her on Twitter @ciberesfera and Medium: Inês Amaral.

Iza Romanowska is a Senior Researcher at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. Her work is focused on computational modelling: she uses simulation techniques to investigate human movements in history and pre-history. The best way to follow her research journey is via her blog Simulating Complexity or on Twitter @Iza_Romanowska.

Jana Diesner is an Associate Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and leads the social computing lab. Her lab applies computational methods to analyze all kinds of corpora and understand human behavior. In a 2016 study, for example, she explored the coverage of documentaries in media outlets vs social media and found that within social media tweets and conversations, the discussions covered much more of the documentaries’ key topic than the news articles did. Follow her on Twitter @janadiesner.

Janet Pierrehumbert is a Professor of Language Modelling at Oxford University and one of the founding members of the Association for Laboratory Phonology. She uses statistical analyses of large corpora, and computational modeling to understand how a variety of factors affect the shape and evolution of language. A fascinating study that Janet and a colleague just published, shows that we are very able to associate English words with the speakers gender, including novel words.

Janine Aronson is a Professor in Management Information Systems at the University of Georgia. Her research focuses around artificial intelligence (in finance), decision making, business intelligence, business analytics, knowledge management, and network optimization; and who would have thought, she is also a professional magician among many other skills and hobbies. A most excellent review she has worked on with colleagues explores the best examples of knowledge management systems to understand how these can transform modern organizations.

Jennifer Nicoll Victor is Associate Professor of Political Science at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government. She is also a co-founder and regular contributor to the political science blog ‘The Mischief of Faction’ at VOX. Jennifer’s areas of research include campaign finance, elections, interest groups, legislatures, quantitative methods, social network analysis and the US Congress. Check out her latest book with two other colleagues on political networks and follow her on Twitter @jennifernvictor.

Jisun An is a scientist at the Qatar Computing Research Institute, where she combines computer science, journalism and public opinion for her research. If you are a fan of Grey’s Anatomy, then Jisun’s paper where she and a co-author used state-of-the-art face analysis software to infer gender, age, and race from profile images of 350K Twitter users from New York: #greysanatomy vs. #yankees: Demographics and Hashtag Use on Twitter. Follow her on Twitter @JisunAn .

Kadija Ferryman is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Data & Society Research Institute and she studies how new and very available health data (like DNA sequencing) impact on moral and ethical claims. Her dissertation was named as one of the top 50 in her field and in her current project, she will be publishing about bias and discriminatory outcomes of big data health research. Follow her on Twitter @KadijaFerryman or Medium Kadija Ferryman, PhD.

Kate Starbird is a Professor at the University of Washington, where she leads the Emerging Capacities of Mass Participation (emCOMP) Laboratory. One of the lab’s current research streams is looking at the response of the crowds in emergency/crisis situations and what causes this large-scale convergence in behavior. She is well known for her work on crisis informatics, as well as more recently misinformation on social media. Kate was a professional basketball player for the US Women National Basketball League and the American Basketball League. Follow her on Twitter @katestarbird.

Katherine Ognyanova is a computational social scientist and an Assistant Professor at Rutgers School of Communication and Information. A postdoc research fellow of the Lazer Lab she has a wealth of experience and is interested in how our social interactions, both in person and online, influence what we know, what we believe to be true, and how we act upon it. Check out her website and follow her @Ognyanova.

Kathleen Carley is a Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University and director of the Center for Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems. Together with 3 colleagues, she recently defined the emerging discipline of social cyber-security, which focuses on the study of social influence and group manipulation. Follow her group’s work on Twitter @CMU_CASOS.

Katrin Weller is the Head of Social Analytics and Services research team at GESIS Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, with her research focusing on social media analysis. Back in 2016 she invited fellow researchers to publish and share the data collected and used in their research from social media to enable reproducibility. Follow her on Twitter @kwelle.

Kokil Jaidka is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Computer Science at the University of Pennsylvania. She established an independent group of researchers looking at summarization tasks and the most recent outcomes from a workshop where 10 different teams from across the world presented their outcomes based on a target of 30 training papers were published in a paper and on GitHub. Her recent research has focused on how digital traces can be used to answer questions about the offline world and society at large. @feedkoko.

Kristina Lerman is a Research Associate Professor at the University of Southern California and her research focuses on applying network- and machine learning-based methods to problems in social computing. In a high level study, Kristina and colleagues looked at emotions from twitter interactions overlaying US Census data to uncover how the strength of the ties between people is linked with level of income, education and language. Follow her on Twitter @KristinaLerman and Medium Kristina Lerman.

Laura Fortunato is a Professor at Oxford University and an External Professor at Santa Fe Institute. She combines her background in biology and anthropology to understand human behavior. Laura is a most active proponent of reproducible research, version control and provenance tracking for software and data; and probably one of the first in her field. Partnering with Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry, she set up Reproducible Research Oxford as a change agent for better use of computational tools in research. Follow her on Twitter @anthrolog.  

Laura K. Nelson is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Northeastern University who uses computational methods to study social movements, culture, gender, institutions, and the history of feminism. Laura recently presented at the Preconference on Politics and Computational Social Science (PaCSS) on finding simple patterns in complex political movements. You can follow her on Twitter @LauraK_Nelson.

Lillian Lee is a Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University. Her research focuses on the relationship between natural language processing and social interaction. A very intriguing paper from her publication list investigates the gender bias in sports journalism and finds that journalists ask male players more questions focused on the game than they do female players.

Lorien Jasney is a Lecturer at University of Exeter in political and environmental network analysis. Her research focuses on public involvement in environmental decision making. In a recent study, she looked at how much the strategies of NGOs are affected by what their peers are doing. Follow her on Twitter @LorienJasny.

Lynette Shaw is an Assistant Professor of Complex Systems at the University of Michigan. A paper that I will be waiting to read once it’s approved by the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization is titled “Something Out of Nothing: a Computational Model for the Social Construction of Value”. She is now working on a few more papers and manuscripts focus on bitcoin and the evolution of bitcoin.

Maria Pereda is a Postdoctoral Researcher at RWTH Aachen University and a punk rock fan. She uses simulation modelling, machine learning, network theory, and game theory in her research of society and human behavior. In a recent study, she explored the impact of expectations on our behavior and how that impacts our perception of being nice. Watch her presentation at IC2S2 2017. Follow Maria on Twitter @MariaPereda.

Marine Carpuat is an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at the University of Maryland. She uses Natural Language Processing, Semantics and Machine Translation in her research. She recently co-authored an article on detecting hypernymy between words in context that won the best paper award at the Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics. Follow her on Twitter @MarineCarpuat.

Martha Stone Palmer was the first woman to get a PhD in Artificial Intelligence at Edinburgh and is currently a Professor of Linguistics at University of Colorado at Boulder. Her research is aimed at building domain-independent and language independent techniques for semantic interpretation based on linguistically annotated data used for training supervised systems. For example, in a recent study with colleagues, she developed a schema for annotating tweets about natural disasters, releasing this and the data publicly to help develop appropriate algorithms that would classify such tweets automatically.

Marti A Hearst is a Professor in the University of California, Berkeley, and her research focuses on search engines, computational linguistics, social technology and teaching at scale, among others. If you’re interested how large scale analysis can be applied to undergraduate exams to understand trends in structure and what professors really think, have a look at a recent paper she published with colleagues.

Meeyoung Cha is an Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Culture Technology at KAIST, South Korea. In a recent paper she co-authored, Meeyoung and colleagues use recurrent neural networks to single out positivity bias in online customer reviews, looking at Samsung as a case study. Follow her on Twitter @nekozzang.

Milena Tsvetkova is an Assistant Professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and in her research she uses large-scale online experiments and network analysis to understand social phenomena. In a recent study with colleagues, she explored how the structure of our interactions can increase inequality in social networks. Follow her on Twitter @tsvetkovadotme.

Mirta Galesic is a Professor and Cowan Chair in Human Dynamics at the Santa Fe Institute and studies how simple cognitive mechanisms interact with social and physical environments to produce seemingly complex social phenomena. In a recent paper with colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, she investigated whether individuals, moderately sized groups or large groups are better at difficult tasks, with clear implications for decision-making processes.

Munmun De Choudhury is an Assistant Professor at Georgia Tech, where she leads the Social Dynamics and Wellbeing Lab. Her research focuses on the use of social media to improve mental health and wellbeing. In a recent study with colleagues, she used statistical modeling and natural language analysis of Reddit and Twitter channels to quantify the changes in behavior and wellbeing of students on college campuses after student deaths. Follow her on Twitter @munmun10.

Qing Tian is Assistant Professor of Computational Social Science at George Mason University. In her recent projects, she explores the use of computational tools and complex systems theory to evaluate policies and improve sustainability in rural development. Explore her projects on researchgate or connect with her via LinkedIn.

Rachel Optiz is a Lecturer in Spatial Archaeometry (archaeology) at the University of Glasgow. In a recent paper she co-authored, Rachel reviews the landscape of contemporary archaeological remote sensing and also provides an overview of the key challenges with employing these new tools in archaeological research. Follow her on Twitter @RachelOpitz.

Rebekah Tromble is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Political Science at Leiden University. In July, it was announced Rebekah will lead an interdisciplinary team of researchers funding by Twitter from Leiden, Syracuse, Delft, and Bocconi Universities, with the aim of improving online discussions on the platform by developing metrics to help identify abusive and threatening behaviors. Rebekah hails from Wyoming and loves exploring nature through hiking, biking and camping. You can follow her on Twitter @RebekahKTromble

Rochelle Terman is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Political Science at the University of Chicago where she teaches computational social science to both undergraduates and graduates. She is a certified instructor with both Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry. While on her way to assistant professor, she is also finding time to write a book where she explores the impact and outcomes of the ‘naming and shaming’ trending practices in human rights organisations. You can check out some of her great teaching resources here. Follow her @RochelleTerman.

Sali Tagliamonte is a Professor of Linguistics at University of Toronto. Recently she worked on a most fascinating project, employing text analysis tools to trace the origins and evolution of the addition of -ly to adverbs in the English language in the UK. Follow her on Twitter @SaliTagliamonte.

Sanaz Mobasseri is an Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior at Boston University. In one of her papers, Sanaz used computational text analysis to understand the emotional content in work email communications and the difference between these sort of responses between men and women in a corporate context.

Sandra Gonzalez-Bailon is an Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where she also leads the research group DiMeNet: Digital Media, Networks, and Political Communication. I would definitely recommend reading her latest book, Decoding the Social World to find out why sometimes our tweets can get out of control totally unexpectedly. Here’s a trailer and follow her on Twitter @sgonzalezbailon.

Sarah Wise is a Lecturer at UCL, in the Center for Advanced Spatial Analysis and completed her PhD in the Department of Computational Social Science at George Mason University. In a fascinating recent paper, Sarah and colleagues, simulated the movement of police vehicles based on real calls and then compared it to the actual police car movements, to understand the nuances of influencing the criminological environment. Follow Sarah on Twitter @ComplexityWise.

Stefani Crabtree is a Computational Archaeologist at Pennsylvania State University, who studies how complexity science can help us understand the archaeological past. Watch her give a lecture on complexity science here. Unsurprisingly, her work has taken her right across the globe and but you can track her down @StefaniCrabtree.

Sue Moon is a Professor in Computer Science at KAIST, South Korea. She studies online social networks and platforms. She co-authored one of the most influential and first papers to employ quantitative and computational tools on Twitter—it was published in 2010 and analysed 3 years worth of twitter data to understand influencers and trends. You can, of course, follow her on Twitter @sbmoon .

Suzy Moat is a Fellow of The Alan Turing Institute, and a Professor of Behavioral Science at Warwick Business School, where she co-directs the Data Science Lab. In a recent study with colleagues, she crowd-sources data to map how scenic some areas are perceived to be. Among many more research papers, she also co-authored the manifesto for Computational Social Science. Follow her on Twitter @suzymoat.

Yu-ru Lin is an Associate Professor at University of Pittsburgh, where she leads the PITT Computational Social Dynamics Lab (PICSO LAB). Her research focuses around the ways we become more informed and how that affects our behavior. For example, in a recent study with 2 co-authors, she looked at 10 years of US Census data to evaluate how exposure to information via social media affects the amount of money raised/donated for political parties in different areas.

Zoe Meers is a Research Assistant and data visualization analyst at the United States Studies Center at the University of Sydney. She was also one of the 2018 Australian Google News Initiative Fellows with the ABC News Lab. She is currently working on a very neat R package ggparliament to plot parliamentary seats by party and per legislature, which you can check on GitHub. Follow her on Twitter @zoe_meers.

Working on their PhD thesis

Carly Knight is a PhD student in Sociology at Harvard University. Her dissertation is making me re-consider the present state of the corporate world in my mind and the way it is depicted as its very own entity. She uses computational text analysis to understand the transition between the corporation as a ‘creation of the state’ to an independent market sector in archival news and other corpora that contain this type of discourse. Follow her on Twitter @carly_r_knight

Diyi Yang is still in her early research career as a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University, but she already has several papers under her belt. Wishing her good luck with the viva, and to give you a flavor of her research, have a look at her thesis where she proposes the use of social theories and computational text analysis to define new and emergent roles that people take in online communities. Follow her updates on Twitter @diyiy_cmu.

Elena Kochkina is a final year PhD student at the University of Warwick and a visiting fellow at The Alan Turing Institute in London. For her research she uses computational tools to classify whether something is true, false or an unverified rumor, and then she also looks at the public response towards the rumor in social media conversations. If we can figure this out, then we will probably be one step closer to solving the never-ending fake news crisis. Follow her research on Twitter @Elena_Kochkina.

Emily Bello-Pardo is a doctoral candidate in Political Science at the American University, Washington. For her dissertation, she will be using computational approaches to study the attitudes toward online mis- and dis-information in the US and Latin America. In 2017, she was also a Google NewsLab Fellow. Born in Caracas, Emily’s promoted voting among the youth and written for a wide range of print and online news outlets, in Venezuela, Colombia and the US. Check out her work on GitHub.

Jackie Kazil is a part-time PhD student at George Mason University and an active member of the open-source community, having founded PyLadies DC and Geo DC. She is a former Presidential Innovation Fellow and also worked in public service, banking, and journalism. Jackie recently co-authored a paper that sets out a better framework of tools for computational macroeconomics. Quite frankly we don’t know how she gets so much done! Follow her on Twitter @JackieKazil or even GitHub.

Janet Xu is a PhD student in the Princeton University Sociology department. She uses computational methods to examine perceptions of demographic diversity. Janet was 1 of 5 teaching assistants at this year’s Summer Institute for Computational Social Science at Duke University. Follow her @janetxu.

Kat Albrecht is currently pursuing a PhD in sociology at Northwestern University. Kat was one of the organizers of the Chicago site of this year’s Summer Institute for Computational Social Science. She is interested large scale crime data and in her most recent publication she worked with a number of colleagues to explore the relationship between school shootings in the US and socio-economic data. Follow her on Twitter @Kat_Albrecht.

Lily Fesler is a fourth year PhD student in economics of education at Stanford University and a fellow at the Institute of Education Sciences, while also pursuing an MA in economics! She uses computational text analysis to understand the issues of in/equity in higher education, focusing specifically on student-teacher and student-student interactions in online courses and MOOCs. Follow her @lilyfesler.

Sarah Shugars is a computational political scientist studying for a PhD at the Northeastern’s Network Science program. Her forthcoming dissertation will explore whether citizens can, as a group, be great collectively at political reasoning; and she will explore this question through the lens of cognitive theory, linguistic theory, and deliberative theory, while also experimenting with crowdsourcing opinions on matters of political concern. Slides from her proposal can be found here.

Taylor Whitten Brown is a sociology PhD candidate at Duke University and has been involved in both iterations of the Summer Institute for Computational Social Science. In her own words, she will ‘investigate the patterns of production and valuation that contribute to inequality between men and women in creative professions’ for her dissertation. Follow her on Twitter @TayWhittenBrown.

Zanele Munyikwa recently started a PhD in information technologies at the MIT Sloan School of Management looking to explore causal inferences in social media for her dissertation. She has a B.S in Computer Science and is interested in measuring impacts of information technology on individuals, organizations and the economy. Follow her on Twitter @zanmuny.

Working in non-profit or private organisations

Alexandra Olteanu, is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Microsoft Research, part of the Fairness, Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics (FATE) group in Montreal. Alexandra investigates the online world and pushing computational analysis to understand ethical behaviors and uses during crises @o_saja.

Alexandra Balahur is a researcher with the European Commission Joint Research Center and a member of the Europe Media Monitor team of the Text and Data Mining Unit. She has a special interest in extracting and classifying sentiments, opinions and emotions expressed in documents written in different languages. Follow her on Twitter @alexyys13.

Alex Hanna is a computational social scientist at Google Cloud. In an attempt to improve knowledge and understanding of Black protests between 1994 and 2010, Alex and a colleague used computational tools to extract this information from news wire stories in a recent article. She is an activist for queer and trans rights and in her free time, she competes in roller derby under the name Kate Silver! Follow her on Twitter @alexhanna.

Eugenia Giraudy recently joined the Core Data Science team at Facebook as a Research Scientist. In a paper she co-authored while at UC Berkeley, Eugenia and colleagues used computational text analysis techniques to identify the amount of text reuse in different policy proposals in the US.  Follow her on Twitter @EugeniaGiraudy

Hanna Wallach is a Senior Researcher at Microsoft and Adjunct Associate Professor, UMass Amherst. Her research focuses on computational social science and in her own words, she develops machine learning and natural language processing methods for analyzing the structure, content, and dynamics of social processes. She is an avid promoter of the field, and if you want an intro into the difference between computer scientists and social researchers, check out her viewpoint piece: “Computational Social Science ≠ Computer Science + Social Data”. Follow her on Twitter @hannawallach and Medium Hanna Wallach.

Lada Adamic is a computational social scientist at Facebook, and probably the only woman on the collective list of authors that have contributed to the 2009 Computational Social Science paper that refined the discipline. Apart from authoring and co-authoring more than a hundred papers on the subject, she’s also written a few books for children, breaking the stereotype one book at a time! Follow her on Twitter @ladamic and Medium Lada Adamic.

Monica Lee is a computational sociologist who works for Facebook in the Core Data Science team. She previously lived in Germany before gaining her PhD from the University of Chicago. Her work on the Frankfurt School for her dissertation brought her back to Germany. She initially learnt German from DJing German electronic music—beats DuoLingo! Now back in California, connect on LinkedIn.   

Kristian Lum is the Lead Statistician at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG), where she leads the HRDAG project on criminal justice in the United States. Her research focuses on examining the uses of machine learning in the criminal justice system. Last year Kristian highlighted her experiences of sexual harassment within academia, speaking out so her story would help other women come forward. You can follow her @KLdivergence.