Organizers

Shruti Phadke is a fourth year PhD student at the University of Washington Information School. Her research focuses studying the social dynamics and linguistic expressions in online fringe communities (eg. domestic extremist groups, conspiracy theorists, and online cults). She has a publication history in CSCW and CHI with a Best Paper Honorable Mention award for in CSCW 2020. Her research methods include quantitative and mixed methods analysis of large scale social media data in context of theories from social psychology and sociology. She has previously received her Masters from Virginia Tech and has worked as a research intern at UT Austin Psychology Lab and Oaks Ridge National Laboratory.

Jessie Seiler is a second year doctoral student in the Epidemiology department at the University of Washington's School of Public Health. Jessie has worked in behavior change communications with domestic and global health non-profits and the Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention. She earned her MPH from the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University, where her research interests coalesced around race-based violence. Her current focus is on the online and in-person epidemiology of white supremacy.

Tanushree Mitra is an Assistant Professor at the University of Washington Information School, where she leads the Social Computing research group. She and her students study and build large-scale social computing systems to understand and counter problematic information online. Her research spans auditing online systems for misinformation and conspiratorial content, understanding digital misinformation in the context of the news ecosystem, unraveling narratives of online extremism and hate, and building technology to foster critical thinking online. Her work employs a range of interdisciplinary methods from the fields of human computer interaction, data mining, machine learning, and natural language processing. Tanu’s work has been supported by grants from the NSF, Social Science One, and DoD.

Kiran Garimella is the Michael Hammer postdoc at the Institute for Data, Systems and Society at MIT and an incoming faculty at Rutgers School of Communication and Information. Before joining MIT, he was a postdoc at EPFL, Switzerland. His research focuses on using digital data for social good, including areas like polarization, misinformation and human migration. His work on studying and mitigating polarization on social media won the best paper awards at WSDM 2017 and WebScience 2017. Kiran received his PhD in computer science at Aalto University, Finland, and Masters & Bachelors from IIIT Hyderabad, India. Prior to his PhD, he worked as a Research Engineer at Yahoo Research, Barcelona, and QCRI, Doha.

Matthew Costello is an assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice at Clemson University. His research focuses on online hate and extremism, and domestic and cross-national political violence and rebellion. His recent work has been funded by the National Institute of Justice, and he is currently conducting research funded by the National Science Foundation that investigates online extremist behavior related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

James Hawdon is a professor of sociology and Director of the Center for Peace Studies and Violence Prevention at Virginia Tech. His research focuses on how communities influence the causes and consequences of violence. He is currently researching how online communities influence online hate, extremism, political polarization, and cybercrime. His recent work has been funded by the National Institute of Justice and the National Science Foundation, and he serves on the advisory board for the European Union’s Network of Excellence in Training on HATE' (NETHATE) project.