Ceren Budak

Ceren Budak is an associate professor of information and associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Michigan, where she also serves as associate director of the Center for Social Media Responsibility and is a faculty fellow at the Center for Political Studies. A computational social scientist trained as a computer scientist, her research examines public discourse and collective behavior on digital platforms, with a particular focus on political polarization, misinformation, and collective action. Her work integrates large-scale field experiments, machine learning, and network science.

Budak’s research has been published in leading journals and venues across general science, computer science, communication, and political science. She has led and contributed to major multi-institutional field experiments examining social media interventions at scale. She served on a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine committee on social media’s impact on youth well-being and was a 2023–24 faculty fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.

Budak’s project, “User Agency and the Trade-offs of Reducing Polarization Online,” builds on her research showing that algorithmic interventions on social media vary in their effectiveness across individuals and platforms and can involve meaningful trade-offs among desirable outcomes. Moving beyond these average effects, she will develop public-facing educational tools that allow people to explore how a given intervention might affect their feed, experiences, and attitudes — and then test whether giving users and communities meaningful agency over algorithmic choices, supported by these tools and participatory governance mechanisms, can yield better, more democratically legitimate outcomes.

May 2026