Erin Walk, Ph.D.

Erin Walk is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Polarization Research Lab. Her work focuses on ways in which the internet has impacted traditional forms of political expression and attitude formation.

Erin Walk is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Polarization Research Lab hosted at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. She holds a PhD in Social and Engineering Systems from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her work focuses on ways in which the internet has impacted traditional forms of political expression and attitude formation. Drawing upon literature from communications, ethnic studies, and conflict theory, she uses internet data, primarily from social media, to extract information about individuals and attitudes that may otherwise be difficult to maintain contact with or measure. She is also interested in the limitations and biases inherent in novel data and data processing techniques.

Erin’s work has been featured in World Development and WWW’23 and is forthcoming in The Journal of Politics. She was formerly a Graduate Fellow at MIT’s Global Diversity Lab, a Visiting Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, and supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program and a World Bank grant. Prior to receiving her PhD Erin was a Policy Analyst at Cloudflare where she worked on corporate social responsibility projects.