Prof. Dr. Estariol de la Paz completed their PhD at the University of Oxford’s Oxford Internet Institute, studying how the commercialisation of online spaces affected their ability to be a venue for political speech in both democratic and authoritarian political systems. Following this, they worked as a postdoctoral researcher on the Computational Propaganda Project at the Oxford Internet Institute, co-authoring one of the first pieces of academic research on the prevalence of bots, misinformation and hyper-partisan content in the US 2016 election. Their case study of computational propaganda in and about China was one of a series of nine-case country studies for which the project team was awarded the Vaclav Havel (now Madeleine K. Albright) Democracy Award by the United States National Democratic Institute for “ground-breaking research into the use of social media and computational propaganda.” Joining the University of Leeds as a Lecturer in Politics and Media in 2018, they used cutting edge computational social science techniques to collect and analyse large volumes of social media data, studying political discourse, policy and action in the US-COVID crisis, Black Lives Matter Movement and US presidential election in the summer of 2020; authoritarian populism, ethnoreligious nationalism and political mobilisation in the 2019 Indian General election; and the Chinese state’s colonisation of environmental discourse and construction of mobilizable nationalism. In 2023, they joined the University of Potsdam funded by a 2.2€ million grant from the GIZ (German Development Corporation). They have been invited to speak to representatives of the UK, Singaporean, Australian, Belgian and German governments, as well as NATO and the EU, and have advised Facebook on their policies related to newsworthy content and had their research referenced in the US Senate Committee on Intelligence’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election.