Erika Franklin Fowler is Professor of Government at Wesleyan University where she directs the Wesleyan Media Project (WMP), which tracks and analyzes political advertising in real-time during elections. Fowler specializes in large-scale analyses of political and health-related communication – from local media and campaign advertising in particular – in electoral and health policy settings, and her interdisciplinary work on the content and effect of messaging has been published in political science, communication, law/policy, and medical journals. She is also co-author of Political Advertising in the United States, and she has led WMP’s expansion into computational analyses of digital advertising.

Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History and Affiliate Professor of Law at Harvard University. A prize-winning professor, she teaches classes in evidence, historical methods, the humanities, and American political history. Lepore's research explores absences and asymmetries in the historical record, with a particular emphasis on the history and technology of evidence. Her most recent book, IF THEN: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future (2020), investigates "the Cold War origins of the data-mad, algorithmic twenty-first century." As a wide-ranging and prolific essayist, Lepore writes about American history, law, literature, and politics. She is a staff writer at The New Yorker, and host of the podcast, The Last Archive.Solomon Messing is the Chief Scientist at Lockwood Strategy (ACRONYM) and an Affiliated Researcher at Georgetown University. Messing uses complex experimentation and modeling, behavioral data from the web, and surveys to study how people understand and react to social information. His most recent research involves using privacy tech to unlock research/ML in corporate data warehouses. He is the author of The Impression of Influence, written with Justin Grimmer and Sean Westwood.

Kate Starbird is an Associate Professor at the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE) at the University of Washington (UW). Starbird's research sits in the emerging field of crisis informatics—the study of how social media and other communication technologies are used during crisis events. Currently, her work focuses on the production and spread of online rumors, misinformation, and disinformation in the context of crisis events. Starbird is a co-founder of the UW Center for an Informed Public.