CCCR collaborates on research projects with a wide network of accomplished scholars and practitioners beyond UW-Madison.
Chris Wells is Associate Professor in the Division of Emerging Media Studies and Department of Journalism, and Interim Director of Emerging Media Studies at Boston University (BU). He is also a Founding Member of the Faculty of Computing and Data Sciences, and Core Faculty with the Institute for Global Sustainability at BU. He is the author of The Civic Organization and the Digital Citizen: Communicating Engagement in a Networked Age (Oxford University Press) and coauthor of Battleground: Asymmetric Communication Ecologies and the Erosion of Civil Society in Wisconsin (Cambridge University Press), as well as dozens of research articles. Wells’ work focuses on understanding the social and communicative conditions necessary for a democratic society to function, and promoting initiatives to improve those conditions. In pursuit of those questions, Wells has published research using a range of methods, from qualitative discourse analysis to surveys to advanced machine learning. During the academic year 2022-23, he led a BU research initiative focused on identifying and fighting misinformation about the climate crisis.
Leticia Bode is a Professor in the Communication, Culture, and Technology master’s program at Georgetown University. She received her PhD in Political Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her work lies at the intersection of communication, technology, and political behavior, emphasizing the role communication and information technologies may play in the acquisition and use of political information, including projects looking at incidental exposure to political information on social media, effects of exposure to political comedy, use of social media by political elites, selective exposure and political engagement in new media, and the changing nature of political socialization given the modern media environment. Work on these subjects has appeared in Journal of Communication, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, New Media and Society, Mass Communication and Society, Journal of Information Technology and Politics, and Information, Communication, and Society, and other journals. She also sits on the editorial boards of Journal of Information Technology and Politics, and Social Media + Society.
Porismita Borah is a Professor of Communication in the Edward R. Murrow College of Communication at Washington State University. She earned her PhD in Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her main areas of research interests are emerging technology in the context of politics and health. She is also affiliated with the Murrow Center for Media and Health Promotion Research. Her research has been published in many prestigious journals including Journal of Communication and Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. She regularly serves as a reviewer for some of the highly-ranked journals in communication and political science. She serves in the editorial boards of journals including Journal of Communication and Journal of Information Technology and Politics. She serves in the WAPOR council is the past Head for the Communication Technology division in AEJMC. Before joining graduate school, Porismita worked as a production executive in New Delhi Television (NDTV), in Delhi, India.
Emily Vraga is an associate professor in the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota, where she hold the Don and Carole Larson Professorship in Health Communication. She earned her PhD in Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research focuses on how individuals respond to news and information about contentious health, scientific, and political issues in digital environments. She studies how to (1) detect and correct misinformation via social media, especially on health topics, (2) use news media literacy messages to limit biased processing and improve news consumption habits, (3) encourage attention to higher quality and more diverse online content. She prioritizes using diverse and novel methodologies to better match an evolving hybrid media environment.
Srijan Kumar is an Assistant Professor at CSE, College of Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology. His research expertise lies in developing AI, applied machine learning, and data mining methods. He builds graph, content (NLP, multimodal), and adversarial learning methods, while utilizing terabytes of data from multiple online platforms spanning multiple modalities and languages. He innovates scalable and efficient methods for online safety by detecting and mitigating malicious actors (e.g., ban evaders, sockpuppets, coordinated campaigns, fraudsters) and dangerous content (e.g., misinformation, hate speech, fake reviews). At the same time, he develops methods to improve the security and safety of AI methods. He is passionate about putting his research into practice — my models have been used at Flipkart (India’s largest e-commerce platform, acquired by Walmart), has influenced Twitter’s Birdwatch platform (community-driven misinformation detection platform), and is now being deployed on Wikipedia. Prior to Georgia Tech, he was a visiting researcher at Google AI, a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University, and a PhD student at the University of Maryland. He was recognized as an NSF CAREER awardee, Kavli Fellow (by the National Academy of Sciences), and Forbes 30 under 30, among many other honors. His work has been covered in a documentary (Familiar Shapes), in a radio interview (WABE), and by popular press, including Wired, CNN, Wall Street Journal, Tech Crunch, New York Magazine, and more.
Munmun De Choudhury is an associate professor at the School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Tech. Her research interests are in computational social science, with a focus on reasoning about personal and societal well-being from social digital footprints. These topics include: Social media; Social computing, Computational social science, Mental health, and Natural Language.
Katie Harbath is a global leader at the intersection of elections, democracy, and technology. As the chief executive of Anchor Change, she helps clients think through tech policy issues. She is the director of technology and democracy for the International Republican Institute and is also a fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center, the Integrity Institute and a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council. Previously, Katie spent ten years at Facebook. As a director of public policy, she built and led global teams that managed elections and helped government and political figures use the social network to connect with their constituents. Before Facebook, Katie held senior strategic digital roles at the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, DCI Group and multiple campaigns.
Shouvik Banerjee is Founder of AverPoint, a news experience that promotes learning and media literacy over outrage. Before AverPoint, he spent 10 years in clean tech at SolarCity, the White House, DOE, and McKinsey. He started his career launching a new media website, and also did software consulting to eBay, Microsoft, and SBC (acquired by AT&T).
Scott Moore is co-Founder and CEO of Colaboratory, a venture-backed startup changing how brands partner and grow together. Colaboratory is the hub and the home of Brand x Brand collabs. Previously, Scott was Chief Marketing Officer for Wynn Resorts and Senior Vice President of Marketing for Best Buy.