Dror Walter

Dror Walter is an Assistant Professor of Digital Communication in the Department of Communication at Georgia State University. He is also a core member of the Transcultural Conflict and Violence Initiative and holds the title of Distinguished Fellow at the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania.

Dr. Walter earned a Ph.D. and M.A. in Communication from the University of Pennsylvania, an M.A. in Political Communication from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a B.A. in Philosophy, Political Science and Economics from the same institution.

Research Interests:

• Political Communication and computational approaches to studying political discourse
• Health misinformation, vaccine hesitancy, and the spread of extremist health narratives
• Machine-learning techniques for frame analysis, network analysis, and thematic-diversity measurement in traditional and social media
• Impact of foreign influence operations on U.S. political communication
• Intersection of extremist political rhetoric and anti-vaccination attitudes

Across more than 35 peer-reviewed articles and chapters (2016-2025), Walter’s scholarship has examined how computational social-science methods—such as unsupervised topic modeling, sentiment analysis, and mixed-method network analysis—can illuminate the structure and effects of political and health-related discourse online. A clear trend is the fusion of traditional media-effects theory with big-data techniques to understand the pathways through which misinformation and extremist narratives gain traction.

Scientific Honors & Fellowships:

• Distinguished Fellow, Annenberg Public Policy Center, University of Pennsylvania

Contact & Resources:

• Email: dwalter2@gsu.edu
• Phone: +1 404-413-5688
• Office: 25 Park Place, Room 929, Atlanta, GA 30303
• Full CV and additional materials available at communication.gsu.edu