Jana Lasser

Professor Jana Lasser holds a professorship in Data Analysis at the University of Graz, where she leads the Complex Social & Computational Systems research group at the interdisciplinary IDea_Lab. She serves as Associate Faculty at the Complexity Science Hub Vienna and previously held positions at Graz University of Technology as a Marie Curie Fellow and interim professor at RWTH Aachen.

Her educational background includes a PhD in Physics from Georg-August-University Göttingen (2019), conducted at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, with research on salt desert pattern formation. Her academic journey reflects a transition from geophysics to computational social science.

Lasser's research centers on emergent phenomena in complex social systems, employing machine learning, natural language processing, and computational modeling. Key interests include misinformation spread on social media, counterspeech effectiveness, social media recommendation algorithms' societal impact, and the fracturing of societal understanding of honesty. Her work combines theoretical frameworks with real-world applications through agent-based simulations and large-scale text analysis.

Her recent publications reveal strong thematic coherence across computational social science, with significant focus on political communication dynamics, platform governance, and methodological innovation. The 15 most recent works demonstrate increasing integration of computational methods with social theory, particularly in analyzing truth-concept evolution in political discourse and developing alternative social media architectures.

• ERC Starting Grant 101160928 DeSiRe for designing social media recommendation algorithms
• FWF standalone project P 37280-N on conspiracy theory spread
• netidee SCIENCE prize for digital civic innovation
• Marie Curie Fellowship for postdoctoral research

Lasser actively supervises graduate students in computational social science, with current focus on topics related to her ERC-funded project. She leads the Survey Special Interest Group within the COST Action on Researcher Mental Health, conducting Europe's largest benchmark study on academic mental health. Her lab maintains strong collaborations with the Complexity Science Hub Vienna and international institutions.