Karsten Donnay is Assistant Professor of Political Behavior and Digital Media in the Department of Political Science and part of the Digital Society Initiative of the University of Zurich as a DSI professor. Before joining the University of Zurich in April 2020, he was Assistant Professor of Computational Social in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Konstanz, Germany. Karsten Donnay received a PhD in Computational Social Science from ETH Zurich in 2014 and was a postdoctoral researcher at the Graduate Institute Geneva and the University of Maryland.

In his research, Karsten Donnay combines a substantive interest in political science with the development and refinement of quantitative methodologies for social science research. In the past years, the main focus of his research has been on understanding the influence of new digital (online) media for political behavior. This includes research on biased media coverage but also on the role of individuals’ perceptions for how such content ultimately affects behavior.

Karsten Donnay’s main methodological interests are related to leveraging experimental and observational data from digital media. He is also interested in the use of computational (agent-based) modeling approaches to capture systemic complexity and in the analysis of highly-resolved geographical data. Together with colleagues, he has also developed and currently maintains a number of software packages for data analysis and visualization that are available as open source tools to the research community.

Next to his academic work, Karsten Donnay advises international organizations as well as public and private sector stakeholders in the area of digitalization and data science.