Dr. Spiro is an Associate Professor at the Information School, a co-director of the Social Media Lab (SoMeLab) and a co-director of the DataLab. Spiro’s research involves the collection and analysis of large-scale social and behavioral data to answer key questions within the areas of sociology, information science, and social computing. Since early 2012, her work has focused on understanding information-related behaviors in the context of crisis events, including rumors, misinformation and collective sensemaking in online environments. This work has twice been funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF).

• Spiro’s faculty page

Dr. Starbird is a Professor in the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering. Her research is situated within human-computer interaction (HCI) and the emerging field of crisis informatics—the study of how information-communication technologies (ICTs) are used during crisis events. One aspect of her research focuses on how online rumors spread during natural disasters and man-made crisis events. More recently, she has begun to focus on disinformation and other forms of strategic information operations online. In 2018, she received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award for research in this area.

• Starbird’s faculty site

Dr. West is an Associate Professor at the Information School and served as the CIP’s founding director. He is a co-founder of the DataLab, the nexus for research on Data Science and Analytics. West develops data mining techniques for studying the Science of Science, where he investigates the origins of scholarly disciplines, the social and economic biases that drive these disciplines, and the impact of the current publication system. Currently, his research focuses on misinformation specifically in and about science.

• JevinWest.org

Ryan Calo is the Lane Powell and D. Wayne Gittinger Professor in the School of Law at the University of Washington and holds a joint appointment in the Information School and a courtesy appointment in Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering. He is also a faculty co-director (with Batya Friedman and Tadayoshi Kohno) of the Tech Policy Lab, a unique, interdisciplinary research unit that spans law, computer science, and information science. A well-known law and technology scholar, Calo has testified before the German Parliament, the California Little Hoover Commission, and the full Judiciary and Commerce Committees of the United States Senate. He has organized events on behalf of the National Science Foundation, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Obama White House, and spoken at Aspen Ideas Festival and NPR’s Weekend in Washington. Calo serves as an advisor to a wide range of organizations — including AI Now, the Center for Democracy and Technology, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation — and is a board member of the R Street Institute.

• Calo’s faculty site

Coward is a Senior Principal Research Scientist at the University of Washington Information School and co-founder of the Center for an Informed Public. Coward, who previously served as director of the Technology & Social Change Group at the iSchool, studies issues of information access, digital equity, information and digital literacy, misinformation, and civic engagement. His research is primarily applied, and he uses participatory methods when engaging with communities. Much of Chris’s research involves partnering with public libraries to co-create new programs around his areas of expertise.

• Learn more about Coward’s work

Dr. Bergstrom’s research uses mathematical, computational, and statistical models to understand how information flows through biological and social systems. With Jevin West, Bergstrom created the Calling BS curriculum, which received international attention and is now being used at more than 70 universities around the world. Bergstrom’s CIP faculty appointment was made in March 2020 and renewed in March 2022 and March 2024.

Dr. Kaiser is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Washington, where she directs the Social Identity Laboratory. Kaiser’s research explores psychological aspects of prejudice, stereotypes, social identity, and diversity, and the intersection of these topics with law, politics, and policy. Kaiser’s research typically adopts an experimental approach, using self-report, psychophysiological, social cognitive, archival, and behavioral assessments both in the lab and field. Kaiser’s research has been supported by the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Science Foundation, and the Russell Sage Foundation. Kaiser’s CIP faculty appointment was made in January 2023.

• Kaiser’s faculty site 

Dr. Lee is a Professor and the Founder and Director of the GAMER (GAME Research) Group at the UW Information School. Her research focuses on exploring new ideas and approaches for organizing and providing access to popular music, multimedia, and interactive media, understanding user behavior related to the creation and consumption of these media, and using these media for informal learning. Recently, her work has focused on using popular media such as escape rooms to help improve the general public’s understanding of misinformation, and investigating how people encounter and develop strategies for combating misinformation in the context of fandom. Lee’s CIP faculty appointment was made in February 2021 and renewed in June 2023.

Lisa Manheim is Charles I. Stone Professor of Law at the University of Washington’s School of Law. Her research explores the law of elections as it intersects with questions of federalism, institutionalism, and the rule of law. Her areas of expertise include administrative law, constitutional law, courts (including the Supreme Court), legislation, and property. Manheim’s scholarship has been published in the University of Chicago Law Review, the Supreme Court Review, the Vanderbilt Law Review, and other leading academic journals. The American Law Institute recently appointed Manheim to serve as co-reporter for the Restatement of the Law, Election Litigation project. Manheim’s CIP faculty appointment was made in January 2023.

Dr. Roesner’s research focuses on computer security and privacy. Her interests are broad within that domain, but she is particularly excited about designing and building systems that address security and privacy challenges faced by end users of existing and emerging technologies. Roesner’s CIP faculty appointment was made in March 2020 and renewed in March 2022 and March 2024.

Dr. Saveski’s research develops tools for analyzing large-scale social data, aiming to provide a better understanding of social structure and behaviors online while also impacting the design of digital social systems. His recent work has focused on reducing political polarization online, improving the quality of online conversations, and causal inference in social systems. His research often falls at the intersections of Social Networks, Machine Learning, and Causal Inference. His work typically appears in venues such as ICWSM, WWW, and KDD, and has included collaborations with researchers at Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. His research has been awarded a best paper honorable mention at WWW ’18 and has been featured in popular media outlets, including The New York Times, National Public Radio, and MIT Tech Review. Saveski’s faculty appointment was made in February 2024.
 

Dr. Su, an Assistant Professor of Global Health in the School of Public Health and an Adjunct faculty at Evans School of Public Policy and Governance at University of Washington, is a health economist with more than 10 years of work experience in health systems and policy. Dr. Su holds a Doctor of Science in Global Health and Population within Health Systems track from Harvard University. During her postdoctoral training at the University of Washington, Dr. Su applied econometric methods to health financing and published papers in The Lancet as co-first author and The Lancet Infectious Diseases as first author. Her publications focus on three areas: 1) economic evaluation of healthcare systems, including analysis of equity, supply, demand, costs, and quality; 2) public policy evaluation; and 3) global health and population measures. Su’s faculty appointment was made in February 2024.

Young’s research examines how individuals leverage digital technologies to engage in conversations across value and knowledge systems. This work contributes to understandings of how new digital strategies are being developed to produce, and marginalize, truths within and between different worldviews. Young’s CIP research fellow appointment was made in March 2020 and renewed in March 2022 and March 2024. Young also serves as director of the Technology & Social Change Group at the iSchool.

@RachelEMoran
Dr. Moran received her doctoral degree from the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. Her research explores the role of trust in digital information environments and is particularly concerned with how trust is implicated in the spread of mis- and dis-information. Her research has been published in Information, Communication & Society, Digital Journalism, Journalism Practice, Media, Culture & Society and Telecommunications Policy. Moran, who previously served as a CIP postdoctoral scholar, also holds a BA and an MA in Social and Political Science from Cambridge University and an MA in Political Communications from Goldsmiths College, University of London. She was the Oakley Endowed Fellow at USC for 2018-19 and the 2018 Benton Foundation Junior Scholar.

Dr. Bayar, based at the UW Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering, is joining the CIP from Binghamton University’s Political Science Department. He studies public opinion and democracy, focusing on conspiracy theories and evolving attitudes on democracy and autocracy. Bayar’s research sits in an interdisciplinary space between political psychology and comparative political behavior with an emphasis on the politics of conspiracy theories and the competing understandings of democratic citizenship. Bayar will be focusing primarily on the CIP’s rapid-response research in the elections space. 

@MaddyJalbert

Dr. Jalbert studies how context and subjective experiences influence memory, judgment, and decision-making. Her work primarily focuses on factors that impact judgments of truth and risk, as well as how these judgments play out in naturalistic contexts. The goal of this work is to shed light on effective strategies for preventing and correcting the spread of misinformation. Jalbert comes from a background in social and cognitive psychology. She completed her Ph.D. in Social Psychology at the University of Southern California under the advisement of Dr. Norbert Schwarz. Prior to this, she worked in the Applied Cognition Research Lab of Dr. Ira Hyman.

https://ischool.uw.edu/people/faculty/profile/mjalbert

Dr. Xu, based at the UW Information School, joins the CIP from Cornell University’s Department of Communication. Her work examines and develops theory-driven communication strategies that address persistent and emergent public health challenges, including racial disparities, vaccine hesitancy, misinformation, and gun violence, with the goal of promoting policy change and health equity. She also researches collective level phenomena in health communication. She conducts experiments, surveys, and content analysis by incorporating computational methods. At the CIP, Xu will be focusing on addressing problems of misinformation and disinformation primarily in the areas of health and wellbeing.

Carter Scanlan joined the Center for an Informed Public in February 2020 with a background in higher education and non-profit work. She worked at Stanford University—first at Stanford Law School and then at the university’s Office of Development—for over a decade, focusing primarily on stewardship, donor relations, and development communications. In 2017, she moved to Seattle, serving for two years as Senior Director of the Washington/Alaska chapter of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society (LLS). At LLS, she was responsible, in partnership with the Executive Director, for all aspects of chapter management including fundraising, operations, staff leadership, events, communications, and strategic planning.

Grass started with the Center for an Informed Public in April 2020 after a career in journalism, where he helped edit and manage news publications primarily in Washington, D.C. He’s the founding editor of Route Fifty, a digital news publication focused on state and local government management, budget and finance, technology and infrastructure that was launched by Atlantic Media in 2015. Grass also worked as a freelance copy editor; an editor in HuffPost’s D.C. bureau; deputy managing editor at Washington City Paper; local news and online editor at The Washington Post’s Express commuter newspaper; founding co-editor of DCist, a local news site in Washington, D.C. now owned by NPR affiliate WAMU; and a copy editor at Roll Call newspaper on Capitol Hill.

Crouse has coordinated the MisinfoDay program for high school students, teachers, and librarians since the Center for an Informed Public launched in December 2019. She has a background in education and librarianship and has worked in New York, North Carolina, and Washington schools as an ESL teacher, language arts teacher, and school librarian. In 2020, she co-founded Teachers for an Informed Public, a group of K-12 educators inspired by the CIP who work to bring information literacy education to their students and communities.

Dr. Tomson is the Research Manager for the CIP’s election rumor research team. She received her doctoral degree in Communication from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Her dissertation is an ethnography of right-wing social media influencers. Her research focuses on the ways political actors use the performance, storytelling and entertainment conventions of popular culture to achieve their goals. Tomson’s expertise touches on themes of public trust in institutions, alternative epistemologies, propaganda, political subcultures, platform politics, and nationalist-populism. Her writing and commentary have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, POLITICO, The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, CNBC, Fox News, Brookings, Mother Jones and more.  

Bermet joined CIP in 2022 with over 20 years of experience executing and managing health research studies at Kaiser Permanente (formerly Group Health). She is currently managing Co-designing for Trust, a collaboration between academic and community researchers, librarians, educators, and other partners working to design community-oriented solutions to misinformation. Co-designing for Trust is a part of the National Science Foundation Convergence Accelerator, a program aimed at addressing national-scale societal challenges through use-inspired convergence research.

Sawyer Besser joined the Center for an Informed Public in 2023. Prior to her role at the CIP, Besser worked in the tech industry, supporting the operational needs of a large intern program. Additionally, she has held various student service roles at the University of Washington. Besser is a UW alum and holds a B.A. in Political Science and Communication. At the CIP, Besser provides administrative and program support to the center’s staff, faculty, and researchers.