I am an Associate Professor at the Department of Communication Science and co-Director of the Societal Analytics Lab at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. In addition, I serve as Chair of the Computational Methods division at the International Communication Association (ICA).
My research covers both methodological innovations in computational communication science and substantive contributions in the areas of journalism and political communication. A social scientist at heart, I combine roots in communication science with expertise in computational disciplines. A central theme in my work is understanding how news gets around and who the most important gatekeepers are in this process. While I initially investigated this primarily through large-scale automated content analysis of news messages, I now also incorporate individual-level audience processes into the equation using online experiments, digital trace data (data donation), and crowd-annotation.
I am also an active open-source developer, building and maintain publicly available research software, R packages, and infrastructure (including the AmCAT text analysis suite and the AnnoCate crowd-annotation platform), alongside open-access educational materials on computational methods and statistics.
In 2020–2023, I was the Principal Investigator of the NWO-VENI project Gatekeeping in the era of fake news: The effects of trust on online news consumption behavior. I am also a co-applicant and collaborator on several national and European research consortia—including OPTIMA (Open Science NL), OPTED (Horizon 2020), What-If (Horizon Europe) and OPINION (COST).
