Ruth Elisabeth Appel

Bio

Ruth Appel is a Stanford Impact Labs Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University and her research focuses on the societal impact of AI and social media and on developing evidence-based approaches to technology governance. She integrates insights from computer science and political science, psychology, and economics, and she uses computational and experimental methods to analyze large-scale datasets. She is particularly passionate about addressing technology governance and ethics challenges, preventing misinformation and election interference, and promoting wellbeing.

Her work has been published or is under review at top journals such as Science Advances or Nature Human Behaviour, and has been recognized with the Nathan McCoby outstanding dissertation award, multiple fellowships, and several impact grants.

Beyond scientific impact, she strives for policy impact. She published popular press articles explaining key results; shared results with high-level government officials; provided inputs to EU policy drafts; and co-organized a transatlantic conference on geopolitics and tech with leaders from academia, industry and policy.

She gained work experience as a Quantitative UX Research Intern at Google, as a Research Associate at Duke University, and as an Intern at the EU Delegation to the UN in New York. She holds a PhD in Political Communication and a Master’s in Computer Science from Stanford University, a Master’s in Public Policy from Science Po Paris and a B.Sc. in Economics from the University of Mannheim.

Honors & Awards

• Innovation Transfer Grant, Stanford University TomKat Center (04/2024)
• Nathan Maccoby Dissertation Award, Stanford University Communication Department (06/2024)
• SAP Stanford Graduate Fellowship in Science and Engineering, Stanford University (09/2019 - present)
• Research Fellowship, Siegel Family Endowment (09/2022 – 07/2023)
• PhD Research Fellowship, Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society (09/2022 - 06/2023)
• Summer Collaborative Research Fellowship, Stanford Impact Labs (06/2022 - 09/2022)
• American Democracy Fellowship, Stanford Center for American Democracy (02/2020 – 01/2021)
• Student Fellowship, German Academic Scholarship Foundation (01/2014 - 06/2019)

Boards, Advisory Committees, Professional Organizations

• Member, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) (2024 - Present)
• Member, Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) (2019 - Present)

Professional Education

• Doctor of Philosophy, Stanford University, COMMU-PHD (2024)
• Master of Science, Stanford University, CS-MS (2024)
• MPP, Sciences Po, Public Policy, Management and Public Affairs (2019)
• B.Sc., University of Mannheim, Economics, Political Science (2016)

Stanford Advisors

• Jennifer Pan, Postdoctoral Faculty Sponsor