Chris Bail Keynote Speaker

Chris Bail is a professor of sociology and public policy at Duke University, where he directs the Polarization Lab. His research focuses on political tribalism, extremism, and social psychology, and he uses data from social media and computational methods to study these issues.

Bail is a Guggenheim Fellow and a Carnegie Fellow, and his work has been published in leading outlets such as Science, Nature, and the New York Times. His 2021 book, “Breaking the Social Media Prism,” was widely acclaimed and featured in the New York Times and the New Yorker. In 2015, Bail published “Terrified: How Anti-Muslim Fringe Organizations Became Mainstream,” which received three awards and led to an invitation to address the 2016 Democratic National Convention.

Bail has also written for the New York Times, CNN, and The Washington Post, and has appeared on NBC Nightly News, CBS, CNN, BBC, and NPR to discuss his research. His work has been covered by more than sixty media outlets, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, Time Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, The Atlantic, Scientific American, Foreign Policy, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, The Guardian, Vox, Daily Kos, National Public Radio, NBC News, C-Span, and the BBC.

In addition to his research and writing, Bail is passionate about building the field of computational social science. He is the editor of the Oxford University Press Series in Computational Social Science and the co-founder of the Summer Institutes in Computational Social Science, which are free training events designed to introduce junior scholars to the field. He also serves on the advisory committee to the National Science Foundation’s Social Behavioral and Economic Sciences Directorate and helped create Duke’s Interdisciplinary Data Science Program. After the publication of “Breaking the Social Media Prism,” Bail began consulting with social media companies, non-profit groups, and governments to implement insights from his research.

Most of the funding for Bail’s research has been provided by the National Science Foundation, the Carnegie Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Russell Sage Foundation, among others. He received his PhD from Harvard University in 2011.

As a speaker, Bail brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to the table, and is well-equipped to address a wide range of topics related to social media, political polarization, and computational methods in the social sciences. His insights and analysis are sure to be thought-provoking and informative, whether he is giving a lecture to students or presenting at a conference. In addition to his research and writing, Bail is also passionate about building the field of computational social science, and has helped to create free training events to introduce junior scholars to the field. Whether he is discussing his own research or offering a broader perspective on these important and timely issues, Bail is sure to engage and educate audiences of all levels.