Kiran Garimella
Assistant Professor of Library and Information Science
Faculty, PhD LIS Faculty
Biography
Kiran Garimella is a computational social science researcher whose work uses large-scale digital data to tackle societal challenges such as misinformation, political polarization, hate speech, and human migration. He combines theory-driven models from computer science with interdisciplinary collaborations in political science, demography, and journalism to understand how information spreads and how digital platforms can be redesigned for social good. Garimella develops end-to-end research pipelines for collecting, analyzing, and sharing digital trace data.
His projects include measuring and mitigating polarization on social media, studying misinformation and extremism on encrypted messaging platforms such as WhatsApp and Telegram, and using social media and platform data to study migration and other demographic processes. His work appears in venues such as the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, the ACM Web Conference, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nature Human Behaviour, Nature Communications, World Development, and Journal of Politics, among others.
Garimella’s research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Knight Foundation, the Omidyar Network, Google, and other funders. He received the Adamic-Glance Distinguished Young Researcher Award in 2024, as well as best paper or best student paper awards at ICWSM, WSDM, and WebSci. Before joining Rutgers, he was the Michael Hammer Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems, and Society and a postdoctoral researcher at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, following research positions at Yahoo Research Barcelona and the Qatar Computing Research Institute.
Education
Ph.D., Computer Science, Aalto University
M.S., Computer Science, IIIT Hyderabad