Katherine (Katya)
Ognyanova

Katherine Ognyanova studies the effects of social influence on civic and political behavior, confidence in institutions, information evaluation, and public opinion formation. Her methodological expertise is in computational social science, network science, and survey research. Recently, her work has examined the association of misinformation exposure with trust in science, media, and politics. She is also investigating public perceptions and trust in artificial intelligence (AI).

Katherine Ognyanova is the director of the Rutgers Computational Social Science Lab. She is also one of the founders and 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.

Ognyanova’s research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the Russell Sage Foundation. Her work has been covered in news outlets including New York Times, NPR, Politico, Washington Post, and WIRED, among others.

Ognyanova’s research areas include quantitative and computational methods, network science, social use of technology, political communication, and mass communication. Her work examines the impact of social structures and technology on civic behavior and the spread of misinformation. More recently, she has explored the social and political disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the flows of information about it.

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