Brooke Foucault Welles

Brooke Foucault Welles is a Professor in the College of Arts, Media and Design at Northeastern University, where she also serves as Interim Dean and Director of the Network Science PhD program. Her research focuses on how social networks and communication technologies shape power dynamics, particularly in contexts of marginalization and social justice.

• PhD in Media, Technology and Society from Northwestern University
• MS and BS in Communication from Cornell University

Her research spans multiple domains including:

• Network science of AI and social systems
• Digital activism and social movement dynamics
• Health information and (mis)information flows
• Open source community structures
• Race/ethnicity in digital contexts
• Computational social science methodologies

Recent publications focus on attention dynamics in social networks, hate speech protection mechanisms, and open-source software sustainability. Her work has been supported by grants from the NSF, NULab, and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

Awards include:

• McGannon Book Award (2021) for #HashtagActivism
• Best Paper Honorable Mention at CSCW 2019

She leads the Communication Media and Marginalization Lab (CoMM Lab) which includes PhD students and postdocs from diverse disciplines. Her advising approach emphasizes interdisciplinary collaboration and methodological training in both quantitative and qualitative approaches.