Emma S. Spiro

Dr. Emma S. 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. Her work also explores the structure and dynamics of interpersonal and organizational networks in both online and offline environments.

In 2019, Dr. Spiro co-founded the Center for an Informed Public (CIP) at UW; she currently serves at the faculty Director. The CIP is a collaborative, multi-disciplinary effort that brings together faculty, staff, students and community partners in service of a core mission aiming to resist strategic misinformation, promote a more informed society, and strengthen democratic discourse.

Dr. Spiro also holds Adjunct appointments in the Department of Sociology and Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering. She is an affiliate of the UW Center for Statistics & the Social Sciences (CSSS) and the Center for Studies in Demography & Ecology (CSDE), as well as a Data Science Fellow at the eScience Institute at UW. Dr. Spiro is co-founder and current co-director of the iSchool’s Data Science and Analytics Lab (DataLab).

Dr. Spiro’s work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Army Research Office, and through other gifts. Her research has been published in PNAS, Science Advances, Social Networks, Field Methods, Demography, and Information, Communication & Society, as well as in premier conferences such as the International Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM), the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, and the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW).

Dr. Spiro holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Irvine. She also holds a B.A. in Applied Mathematics and a B.A. in Science, Technology, and Society from Pomona College, as well as an M.A. from the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences at the University of California, Irvine.