Alex Leavitt, PhD

My name is Alex Leavitt (they/them), and I'm a social scientist and internet researcher. Most recently, I spent 7 years at Meta Research, leading research for product, policy, and strategy work related to social media's impact on society generally and marginalized populations specifically.

Most of my projects touched on misinformation, polarization, news & information needs, crisis response (COVID-19/vaccines, Ukraine, LGBTQ+ communities, etc.), and human rights issues (particularly across the Global South/Global Majority).

I currently reside in San Francisco, after having lived in Los Angeles, Kyoto, and Boston.

Background

I frequently work across industry and academia, publishing my research in venues like ACM CSCW and ACM SIGCHI.

Spanning my research career, I have been part of a number of data science and user experience research teams with major social media platform and interactive media companies, like Meta, Sony PlayStation, Disney Interactive, and SocialFlow.

Before going into industry, I received my PhD in Communication from the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism at the University of Southern California, where I was advised by Henry Jenkins and Dmitri Williams. Previous to that, I worked with danah boyd at Microsoft Research New England; I was also a researcher in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Comparative Media Studies department.

Numerous outlets have also featured my research, such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, CNN, and the Huffington Post.

You can find all my peer-reviewed scientific articles on Google Scholar or in the academic research section of this page.