Sandra González-Bailón, Ph.D.

Sandra González-Bailón is an Assistant Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication, and affiliated faculty at the Warren Center for Network and Data Sciences. Prior to joining Penn, she was a Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute (2008-2013), where she is now a Research Associate. She completed her doctoral degree in Nuffield College (University of Oxford) and her undergraduate studies at the University of Barcelona. Her research lies at the intersection of network science, data mining, computational tools, and political communication. She leads the research group DiMeNet –acronym for Digital Media, Networks, and Political Communication.

Her book Decoding the Social World (MIT Press, December 2017) explains how data science and the analysis of networks help us solve the puzzle of unintended consequences – or why our intentional actions often trigger outcomes that we did not intend or even envision. The key to the puzzle, the book argues, is to integrate different levels of analysis in our theories of social change, something we can do now because of new data and computational tools.

Her most recent project, “Digital News and the Consumption of Information Online” (2017-2020) is funded by the National Science Foundation.