Megan A. Brown

I am a PhD student in Information and Scientific Computing at the School of Information and the Michigan Institute for Computational Discovery and Engineering(MICDE) at the University of Michigan. I am a the recipient of the 2026-2027 MICDE Fellowship. My research spans two related areas: computational social science research infrastructure and online political communication.

In my research infrastructure work, I take a broad view of research infrastructure, considering the social, policy, and technical infrastructures that support research work. I examine how researchers access, share, and reuse internet data responsibly, including the challenges of studying platforms in the “post-API” era, researchers’ experiences with restricted data access systems, and the legal and ethical considerations of web scraping. I also evaluate how large language models can support computational social science workflows, with an emphasis on privacy-preserving methods for replication and data reuse. Finally, I study the social infrastructures that sustain researchers themselves, particularly early career researchers who study harmful content online or face the impacts of ongoing political attacks on research.

In my political communication work, I study how political actors, platforms, and audiences interact online, and what those interactions mean for civic life. This work examines political communication across platforms, algorithmic amplification of political content, and the cross-platform spread of election misinformation and state propaganda. I am also interested in the relationship between offline and online contexts, including partisan geographic segregation, neighborhood discourse on Nextdoor, and geographic targeting in political advertising.

In Communication, my work has been published in Political Communication, New Media & Society, and Social Media + Society. In Computer and Information Sciences, my work has been published in ACM CSCW, ACM FAccT, and AAAI ICWSM.

Formerly, I was the Sr. Research Engineer at the Center for Social Media, AI, and Politics at New York University where I collected and maintained large-scale collections of social media and digital trace data for social science research. I received my Bachelor of Arts in Politics with a minor in Middle East & Islamic Studies from New York University in 2019.