Bio
Chris has always had a strong passion for interdisciplinary research and the marriage between the social and ‘hard’ sciences. He studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) at the University of Warwick receiving a scholarship from the German National Academic Foundation. In 2017 he completed his MPhil in economics specialising in macroeconomics and financial economics at the University of Cambridge. He wants to continue exploring the application of cutting-edge quantitative methods to the social sciences in his DPhil in computational social science at The Alan Turing Institute and the Oxford Internet Institute.
Research interests
Chris' doctoral research focuses on polarisation on social media is a quasi-natural outcome given network structures and social mechanisms, such as homophily. In that way social network are self-polarising entities, independently from aspects such as algorithmic exacerbation. This includes phenomena such as self-fragmentation or inverted spiral of silences via reverse agenda-setting. Self-fragmentation is essentially a mathematical limit of homophilic networks, whilst an inverted spiral of silence makes majorities self-silence through a variety of factors and extremists more emboldened thus distorting the visible online opinion distribution. These phenomena are obviously strengthened under current algorithmic regimes, which encourage more homophilic attachments and information exchange
Selected publications and papers
'- Paper in the Journal of Mathematical Sociology with Taha Yasseri "Algorithmic Bias cannot stop fragmentation in homophilic networks"
- Paper in Journal of Computational Social Science with Taha Yasseri, Patrick Gildersleve, Rachel Dinh "Computational Courtship: Understanding the evolution of online dating through large-scale data analysis