Max Pellert

Max Pellert is a computational social scientist and cognitive scientist with faculty appointments at multiple institutions. Since 2022, he has served as an Assistant Professor at the Chair for Data Science in the Economic and Social Sciences at the University of Mannheim. He previously held an interim Professor position at the University of Konstanz and an Assistant Researcher role at Sony Computer Science Laboratories Rome. His work bridges computational methods with social science theory.

• Education
  • M.Sc., University of Vienna (2017) in Middle European interdisciplinary Master's program in Cognitive Science (with distinction)
  • Ph.D., Medical University of Vienna (2022) in Medical Informatics, Biostatistics & Complex Systems

Research interests center on Computational Social Science, Digital Traces, and Natural Language Processing for emotion and sentiment analysis. He develops Temporal Adapters for tracking longitudinal emotional patterns and FAULTANA pipeline for polarization studies. His AI Psychometrics framework assesses personality-like traits in large language models.

Recent publications include: (1) 2025 ACL work on political bias in LLMs; (2) 2025 ICWSM study of temporal emotion analysis; (3) 2024 Perspectives on Psychological Science paper on LLM psychometrics; (4) 2024 PNAS Nexus polarization analysis; (5) 2023 Emotion cross-cultural study of pandemic emotions.

• Scientific Awards
  • Habilitation candidate status at University of Mannheim

Teaching includes IS 616: Large Scale Data Analysis, IS 809: Advanced Text Mining Lab, and IS 723: Data Science Seminar at master’s and PhD levels. His Barcelona Supercomputing Center role focuses on principal investigator duties for computational social science projects.