Sandra González-Bailón, Ph.D.

Sandra González-Bailón studies communication networks and how they shape exposure to information. Her empirical research spans the analysis of formal and informal collaboration, non-institutional forms of civic engagement, the coordination of information campaigns, and the consumption of news and political content.

Sandra González-Bailón is the Carolyn Marvin Professor of Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication, and Director of the Center for Information Networks and Democracy (CIND). She also has a secondary appointment in the Department of Sociology at Penn.

Prior to joining Penn, she was a Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute (2008-2013). She completed her doctoral degree in Nuffield College (University of Oxford) and her undergraduate studies at the University of Barcelona.

Her research agenda lies at the intersection of computational social science, political communication, and the analysis of networks. Her applied research looks at how online networks and algorithmic curation shape exposure to information, with implications for how we think about collaboration, political engagement, mobilization dynamics, information diffusion, and the consumption of news.

Her articles have appeared in journals like PNAS, Nature, Science, Political Communication, Journal of Communication, and Social Networks, among others. She is the author of the book Decoding the Social World (MIT Press, 2017) and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Networked Communication (OUP, 2020). She also wrote the book El Vuelco with El País journalist Jordi Pérez Colomé. The book will be published in May 2026 with Deusto-Planeta.