Research Team
Ridhi Kashyap
Professor of Demography and Computational Social Science
Ridhi is professor of demography and computational social science at the University of Oxford and professorial fellow of Nuffield College. She is the Principal Investigator of the Digital Gender Gaps project. Her research spans different areas of demography and sociology. As a part of the Digital Gender Gaps project, she and the DGG team are studying gender inequalities in internet and mobile use and their implications for other types of social inequalities. Her other research is on topics such as son preference, prenatal sex selection and gender gaps in health and mortality, and the effects of educational expansion on marriage and family change. Her methodological interests focus on how computational innovations both in terms of modelling approaches and digital data from web and social media platforms can be applied to study population dynamics and sustainable development.
Ingmar Weber
Alexander von Humbolt Professor in Artificial Intelligence
Ingmar is the Alexander von Humboldt Professor in Artificial Intelligence at Saarland University. He was previously Research Director for Social Computing at the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI). His interdisciplinary research looks at what online user-generated data can tell us about the offline world and society at large. He works with sociologists, political scientists, demographers and medical professionals to address topics ranging from digital gender gaps, to lifestyle diseases to improving population statistics. Prior to joining QCRI, Ingmar Weber was a researcher at Yahoo! Research Barcelona where he pioneered the use of Big Data to monitor international migration.
Valentina Rotondi
Senior Researcher
Valentina is Researcher at University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland (SUPSI) within the Department of Business Economics, Health, and Social Care (DEASS). She is an associate member of Oxford University’s Department of Sociology, Nuffield College, the Swiss School of Public Health, and the Milan Center for Neurosciences. Grounded in behavioral and applied economics, Dr. Rotondi’s research centers on gender inequalities, demography, and development, highlighting her commitment to nuanced and interdisciplinary inquiries.
Casey Breen
Senior Postdoctoral Fellow in Computational Social Science
Casey Breen is a Senior Postdoctoral Fellow in Computational Social Science working with Professor Ridhi Kashyap. Before joining Oxford, he completed his PhD in Demography and MA in Biostatistics at the University of California, Berkeley. Casey’s research develops and applies computational and demographic methods to examine critical questions in Demography. One of his lines of research aims to advance understanding of health and mortality disparities in the United States by combining multiple administrative datasets using record linkage techniques, such as full-count census records and population-level mortality data. His second line of research develops and applies network-based methods to (1) count and sample hard-to-reach or “hidden” populations and (2) estimate mortality rates in humanitarian emergencies.
Prashant Poddar
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Prashant is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Sociology, working on the ‘Mapping global gender gaps in digital connectivity’ project. Prior to joining Oxford, he was an Assistant Professor in the Economics department at the Indian Institute Management of Amritsar (IIM Amritsar). Prashant received his Ph.D. from the Indian Institute of Management Lucknow (IIM Lucknow), specializing in the Economics area. His research interests are in the fields of applied microeconomics and development economics, with a focus on issues related to gender, education, health, labor, and religion. Prashant’s research has been published in international peer-reviewed journals including Economica, Economic Development and Cultural Change, Population and Environment, and Transport Policy. He has also presented his work at several conferences including those organized by the American Economic Association, the European Economic Association, and the Royal Economic Society. Prashant is also a Fellow of the Global Labor Organization (GLO).
Massomali Fatehkia
Research Assistant
Masoomali is a research assistant at the Social Computing group of the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI). His research is focused on the use of social media advertising data to augment traditional statistical sources for monitoring development goals. His involvement with the Digital Gender Gaps project began in the summer of 2017 when he visited QCRI as part of Princeton University’s International InternshipsProgram. He completed his undergraduate studies at Princeton University in 2018 where he majored in Operations Research with certificates (minors) in Statistics & Machine Learning and Applications of Computing.
Doug Leasure
Senior Researcher and Data Scientist
Doug is a senior data scientist for the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science at the University of Oxford. He is a member of the Department of Sociology and an affiliate member of Nuffield College. His research is focused on demographic estimation in data scarce contexts by developing Bayesian statistical methods to integrate novel data sources from remote sensing, geospatial information, and digital traces (such as social media activity) with traditional data from household surveys, census, and registry data. He has a PhD in Biological Sciences and post-doctoral research experience at WorldPop and the Odum School of Ecology.
Jiani Yan
Research Assistant
Jiani is a DPhil student and research assistant in the Department of Sociology at the University of Oxford. As a computational social scientist, she specializes in exploring health disparities in mortality and morbidity, employing advanced techniques such as machine learning, deep learning algorithms, and explainable artificial intelligence to drive insights and understanding.
Till Koebe
Postdoctoral Researcher
Till is a postdoctoral researcher in Societal Computing at Saarland University. He holds a PhD in Statistics from the Freie Universität Berlin. His work focuses on the use of non-traditional data sources to address societal challenges. Current works include car detection from space to estimate population displacement and investigating behavioral spillover effects in health outcomes via social connectedness. Till has been working in the area of big data analytics since 2013. From its inception, he was a member of the OPAL project mediating between the development team and the user needs. Later, he co-founded a startup that analyzed telecommunications data. He worked for four years on statistical capacity building and the data revolution at the OECD/PARIS21
Jiaxuan Li
Research assistant
Jiaxuan Li is a graduate student at University of Oxford, pursuing an MPhil in Sociology and Demography. His research focuses on social stratification and homeownership using quantitative methods. He has worked for DGG project since 2023, focusing on data manipulation and modelling work for both national and subnational pipeline.
Xinyi Zhao
Research assistant
Xinyi Zhao is a postdoctoral researcher at Adaptive Rationality Center, Max Planck Institute for Human Development. She holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Oxford. She was also affiliated with Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research during her PhD. Her work research centers on the disparity in scientific systems, by leveraging large-scale digital data and computational approach. Current works include open-source large language models (LLMs) to behavioral and social science datasets to uncover psychological mechanisms and assess the generalizability of findings. She is also interested in GIS and spatial data analysis.
Alumni
Getaendale Simesh Ayele
Research assistant
Getaendale is a doctoral student jointly enrolled at the University of Milan and University of Pavia in Italy. Specializing in Policy Evaluation, Getaendale also serves as a research assistant at SUPSI.
Salvatore Maione
Postdoctoral Researcher
Salvatore is a Researcher at Department of Business Economics, Health and Social Care of the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland (SUPSI). Previously, he collaborated with the Quality Assurance Service of USI Università della Svizzera italiana in mapping, analysing, and optimising internal processes and providing statistical support to other administrative services in the University. Moreover, he was a teaching assistant in several Marketing-related courses (i.e., Digital Marketing, Pricing and Market Research) as well as a researcher in the context of choice behavior.