Dr. Francesca Tripodi is a sociologist and information scholar whose research examines the relationship between search engines, participatory platforms, politics, and society. She is a Principal Investigator at the Center for Information Technology and Public Life (CITAP) at UNC-Chapel Hill and an affiliate (former postdoctoral scholar) at Data & Society Research Institute. She has twice testified before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee (April 10, 2019 and July 16, 2019), to explain how relevance is gamed to drive ideologically based queries and spread conspiratorial logic. In addition to her research on search engines, Dr. Tripodi’s work documents how race and gender impact perceived notability – highlighting that cis-gender women are nearly twice as likely to be considered non-notable subjects than their cis-male peers. Along with her Co-PIs at MIT and Stanford, Dr. Tripodi received a National Science Foundation Accelerator Award in 2021 to study how people find information and build tools to enhance and enable search literacy.
