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 Science 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.

The main focus of his research is on the study of digital democracy, i.e., the implications of digital technology for politics and democratic processes. More specifically, he and his team are interested in how digital communication and news platforms together with new ways of digital participation change individual political behavior. In addition, they investigate how these changes then impact political communication and political processes. And, lastly, they try to tackle specific policy problems related to the digital transformation where their research can provide evidence-driven recommendations to civil society and political stakeholders.

In their projects, Karsten Donnay and his team leverage experimental and observational data from digital media, automated text classification using state-of-the-art machine learning approaches as well as surveys and survey experiments. Together with colleagues, they have also developed and currently maintain a number of software packages for data analysis and visualization that are available as open source tools to the research community. Karsten Donnay is a member of the executive board of the Population Research Center (PRC) of University of Zurich, a collaborative and integrated scientific platform for population-based research, where he contributes his expertise in running large-scale, representative population surveys.

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.