Katherine Ognyanova (Katya) is a researcher and educator exploring the structure of social and political processes in a digital age. She works as an Associate Professor at the School of Communication and Information, Rutgers University. Her research areas include quantitative and computational methods, social use of technology, political communication, and mass communication.

Katherine studies the effects of social influence on civic and political behavior, confidence in institutions, information exposure/evaluation, and public opinion formation. Her methodological expertise is in computational social science, network science, and survey research. She is the director of the Rutgers Computational Social Science Lab. Her recent work examines the association of misinformation exposure with trust in science, media, and politics.  She is also investigating public perceptions and trust in artificial intelligence (AI).

Ognyanova is a principal investigator for the COVID States Project and the Civic Health and Institutions Project, two large multi-university initiatives exploring public attitudes to politics and health.

Prior to joining Rutgers, Katherine was a postdoctoral research fellow in computational social science at the Lazer Lab, Northeastern University and IQSS, Harvard University. She received her Ph.D. from the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism, University of Southern California.

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