I am a Senior Researcher for Computational Social Science in the Digital Society Observatory at GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences in Cologne. Before, I worked as a pre-doctoral researcher in the Computational Communication Science Lab at the University of Vienna and as Junior Fellow at the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna. My research focuses on understanding the prevalence and harms of misinformation on social media, alongside the socio-affective, technological, and systemic dysfunctions in information environments.

While I am a social scientist at heart, I combine a variety of methods to approach this problem. I enjoy interdisciplinary settings, collaborating with and learning from computer scientists and physicists in my team. I am particularly interested in how we can reliably use computational and complex methods to study social phenomena, often analyzing large-scale social media data to study such phenomena in the wild. For instance, to study effects of misinformation online – where randomization is impossible –, I have applied causal inference approaches on observational data, and to understand socio-affective dynamics and misinformation engagement, I have used time series methods. Read more about my current working papers and publications in Publications.

My educational background is (political) communication science and polito-linguistics (University of Amsterdam, University of Bremen). During my doctoral education at the Universtiy of Vienna and the Complexity Science Hub, I have learned a lot about different text-as-data approaches, working efficiently and transparently with massive datasets remotely, and recently, how to integrate AI agents into these processes. Though it occasionally also makes me want to throw my laptop out the window, I love to think about how to implement computational methods and complexity science into the study of digital and complex communication, which is why I co-organized the ICA hackathon a few times as well as COMPTEXT 2025 in Vienna. Hit me up if you are interested in collaboration, have a stupid question (which don’t exist, in my opinion), or just want to chat about workflows, academia, or social media data!