(From left) Tanushree Mitra and Ph.D. students Prerna Juneja, Shruti Phadke, and Md Momen Bhuiyan participated in a training workshop at Facebook earlier this month.

Tanushree Mitra, assistant professor of computer science in the College of Engineering and a faculty member at the Discovery Analytics Center, has received a Social Media and Democracy Research Grant, giving her access to Facebook data to study how misinformation and other problematic content spread on the platform. This is the first time Facebook has given academics access to its data.

Mitra is among 60 international researchers — and one of only two women principal investigators — to receive the grant, funded by a number of leading foundations and administered through a Social Science One and Social Science Research Council collaborative partnership that bridges the gap between academics and the private sector.  Click here to read more about Mitra’s grant.