Meet Our Team
Our research team brings together experts in digital media, platform studies, and online culture. We work at Australia's two leading universities for research on digital media and have spent years studying how digital technologies shape our world.
Chief Investigator & Project Leader
Patrik Wikstrom is a Professor of Computational Communication. He is Chief Investigator in QUT's Digital Media Research Centre and Associate Investigator in the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision Making and Society.
Chief Investigator
Jean Burgess is Distinguished Professor of Digital Media. Jean is Chief Investigator in QUT's Digital Media Research Centre and Associate Director of the national ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society.
Partner Investigator
Ariadna Matamoros-Fernández is Associate Professor at Dublin City University. Ariadna researches social media cultures, platform governance, online harms, and algorithmic systems.
Chief Investigator
Jonathon Hutchinson is Associate Professor and Chair of the Media and Communication Discipline at the University of Sydney. Jonathon is also Chief Investigator at 'The International Digital Policy Observatory' as well as in the project 'Emerging online safety issues: co-creating social media education with young people'.
Chief Investigator
Dr Joanne Gray is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Cultures in the Discipline of Media and Communications, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Sydney. She is an interdisciplinary academic with expertise in digital platform policy and governance. Her research seeks to understand how digital platforms, such as Google/Alphabet and Facebook/Meta, exercise private power and explore relevant policy options.
Jiaru Tang
PhD Candidate
Jiaru Tang is a PhD candidate at Digital Media Research Centre at Queensland University of Technology, and a student member of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision Making and Society. Her research focuses on AI-generated content, cultural production, and creative labour in the platform economy.
Tian Wen
PhD Candidate
Tian Wen is a PhD candidate in the Discipline of Media and Communications at the university of Sydney. Her primary focus is on understanding the mechanisms by which content becomes popular on TikTok. She is also a product manager with a proven track record of delivering innovative solutions that drive software growth.
Michelle Gay Nidoy
PhD Candidate
Michelle Gay Nidoy is a PhD Student at the Digital Media Research Center (DMRC) of Queensland University of Technology. She is a graduate of the Joint Master's Degree in Digital Communication Leadership from Paris Lodron University of Salzburg, Austria and Vrije Universiteit Brussels, Belgium under the Erasmus Mundus scholarship. Prior to joining DMRC, she worked as a researcher and science communicator at research centres focusing on digitalisation, democracy and innovation, and AI, data and robotics. Her research interests lie in digital users, platform governance, and content moderation.
