Ruth Elisabeth Appel

Bio

Ruth Appel is a Postdoctoral Scholar at Stanford University and her research focuses on AI governance and how we can use technology to promote the social good. She combines insights from psychology, political science and computer science, and uses computational and experimental methods to analyze large-scale datasets. She is particularly passionate about preventing the spread of misinformation and election interference, promoting wellbeing and mental health, and addressing ethical challenges related to technologies such as social media and large language models.

Her research includes a project measuring the reach of influence campaigns on Facebook and Instagram during the 2020 US elections (part of the Facebook and Instagram Election Study), designing and evaluating an online game to combat vaccine misinformation, and a large-scale evaluation of misinformation interventions on Facebook. She has written about how partisanship affects content moderation preferences and about the ethics and privacy implications of new technologies.

She gained work experience as a UX Research Intern at Google, as a Research Associate at the Center for Advanced Hindsight 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

• Master of Public Policy, Sciences PO Paris Institute of Political Studies, Management and Public Affairs (2019)
• Master of Science, Stanford University, CS-MS (2024)
• Doctor of Philosophy, Stanford University, COMMU-PHD (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