I am an Assistant Professor at Stanford University (Graduate School of Business) studying the psychological differences between people. I hold a doctorate in psychology from the University of Cambridge and master's degrees in psychometrics and in social psychology.

I was the Deputy Director of the University of Cambridge Psychometrics Centre, a researcher at Microsoft Research, and a post-doctoral scholar at Stanford's Computer Science Department.

Also, I had nothing to do with Cambridge Analytica.

Research (read more)

In pursuing my diverse research program, I have published over 70 papers in leading journals including Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Machine Learning, Psychological Science, and Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. They have been cited over 6,000 times.

Privacy

What do your digital footprints reveal about you?

Faces

What does your face reveal about your character?

Psychometrics

How to accurately measure psychological traits

Highlights

2018

Our JPSP paper warning that widely used facial recognition technology can be used to expose sensitive traits was featured on the cover of The Economist.
I appeared in the film Do You Trust This Computer?, along with Elon Musk and Ray Kurzweil. Over 1.4 million watched the preview, and the film won the Audience Award at CinemaAmbiente.

2017


A conversation with David C. Brock on the future of politics and big data at the Computer History Museum.
I discussed the role of big data in the 2016 U.S. presidential election with Fareed Zakaria.

2016

A Das Magazin article (English version at Vice.com) about my privacy research was the most widely discussed German press article of 2016.
I testified before the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on the implications of big data for equal employment opportunity.

2015

I received a Rising Star award from the Association of Psychological Science.
Our 2015 paper was ranked as the 22nd top paper that most caught the public imagination in 2015.
Our predictive models were employed in the online companion to the Watchdogs video game. It was used by over one million people within three weeks of its launch.

2014

I was listed among the 50 most influential people in big data in 2014 according to DataIQ.
Two of my papers were among the top 100 papers that most caught the public imagination in 2013 (#9 and #21).
I was one of the characters depicted in Privacy, a 2014 theater play written by James Graham and produced by Donmar Warehouse.

2013 and earlier

Two TED talks focused on our 2013 PNAS paper: by David Stillwell and by Jenn Golbeck.
Our team was awarded a prestigious European Union grant, under the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7), to work on an online collaborative environment.