Annie Waldherr is a professor of Computational Communication Science at the Department of Communication. Before joining the University of Vienna, Annie was an Assistant Professor at the Department of Communication Science at the University of Münster in Germany and a Research Associate at the Institute for Media and Communication Studies at Freie Universität Berlin.

Annie Waldherr is currently the Vice Chair of the Computational Methods Division of the International Communication Association (ICA) and a member of the editorial boards of Communication Theory, Media and Communication as well as Computational Communication Research.

Nicola Righetti is a postdoctoral researcher in Computational Communication Science at the Department of Communication at the University of Vienna and a former postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Urbino Carlo Bo (Italy).

He has been a member of the Italian team that was awarded the ‘Social Media and Democracy Research Grant’ by SSRC in partnership with Social Science One and Facebook to study the spread of problematic information on Facebook, and is a co-author of the R package CooRnet, a library to detect ‘coordinated link sharing on Facebook’.

Aytalina Kulichkina is a Ph.D. student and a research associate at the Department of Communication supervised by Annie Waldherr. She obtained her Master of Science degree in Communication Science from the University of Vienna in July 2020 with a thesis entitled “Effects of incidental news exposure on political trust: The role of national identification and system justification”. During her second year of master’s studies, she served as a teaching assistant at the Department of Communication. 

Azade Kakavand is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Communication and a research associate at the Computational Communication Science Lab of the University of Vienna, supervised by Annie Waldherr. She obtained her Master of Arts in “Journalism, Media and Globalisation” at the University of Amsterdam and Aarhus University. For her master’s thesis, she researched minority signification in German crime reporting. Additionally, she has worked as a research assistant at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research.

 Our research focuses on

·   Computational Social Science

·   Political Communication

·   Digital Media

·   Technology and Science Communication

·   Digitized Public Spheres

·   Public Attention and Protest Dynamics

·   Online Information, Misinformation, and Disinformation

·   Polarization and Radicalization

Last but not least:

Sarah Epp-Kampl is the organizational assistant to Annie responsible for administrative tasks and project coordination within the team. She is happy to return to work after parental leave before which she was a project coordinator and office manager at an exhibition wall company in Vienna for seven years. She also studied communication sciences and graduated from the University of Salzburg in 2004. Her thesis about dream and cinema on film theories dealing with visual spectatorship was published by Peter Lang in 2011 (Traum und Kino – ein (un)gleiches Paar).

Now we are looking forward to the exciting projects and fruitful collaboration within the Computational Communication Science Lab!