David Jurgens

David Jurgens is an Associate Professor jointly appointed at the School of Information and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan. His research bridges Natural Language Processing (NLP), social psychology, and data science to study human behavior within social systems. He holds a PhD from UCLA and has held postdoctoral positions at Stanford University and McGill University.

Education:

• PhD in Computer Science, University of California, Los Angeles
• Postdoctoral Scholar, Stanford University (with Dan Jurafsky and Jure Leskovec)
• Postdoctoral Scholar, McGill University (Network Dynamics Group)

Research Interests: Focuses on sociolinguistics, computational social science, and ethical AI. Key themes include demographic inference from text, social relationship modeling, online behavior impacts, and mitigating incivility in digital spaces. His work has been published in venues like PNAS, WWW, ACL, and EMNLP.

Publications: Recent work spans AI ethics frameworks, LLM fine-tuning for subjective perception, citation fidelity analysis, and multilingual moral reasoning. His research emphasizes interdisciplinary applications of NLP to societal challenges.

Awards:

• Cozzarelli Prize (National Academy of Sciences)
• Cialdini Prize (Society for Personality and Social Psychology)
• Best Paper Awards at ICWSM and W-NUT

Advising & Grants: Mentors students in NLP and computational social science. Teaches courses on NLP, information retrieval, and data mining. Active in conference organization (e.g., ACL, EMNLP) and journal editing (Frontiers special issue on Computational Sociolinguistics).

Labs & Teams: Leads the Blablablab research group, focusing on interdisciplinary projects in NLP and social science. Collaborates with experts in psychology, linguistics, and sociology to advance data-driven methodologies.