Michael Maes

Michael is a NIAS-Lorentz Theme Group Fellow (Social Media for Digital Democracy: Theory, Applications, Algorithms) during 2022-2023.

"I am professor of sociology at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. My chair is part of the Institute of Technology Futures, and focusses on sociology and computational social science. In addition, I am the scientific director of the Methods Lab at KIT’s House of Competence.

My general research interest concerns collective action and social integration in social networks. I use computational modeling techniques to develop new hypotheses. To test these hypotheses, I have gathered longitudinal network data in several organizations and conducted laboratory experiments. In the past years, my focus has shifted towards process of opinion polarization and the spreading of falsehoods in online communication systems. For instance, I develop computer models of online social networks and study the effects of filter bubbles, and social bots. I test model assumptions and predictions with observational data from the web and field experiments.

Before moving to Karlsruhe, I was assistant professor at the Department of Sociology and the ICS at the University of Groningen. Before that, I was senior scientist at ETH Zurich.

I taught model building, sociological theory, and research methodology in the undergraduate Sociology program of the University of Leipzig, and the University of Groningen, as well as at ETH Zurich and the KIT."