Bio
Tanja Aitamurto, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois Chicago, where she is the founding director of the Media/Democracy Lab. Her research examines how individuals and communities engage with media, shape public life, and influence the collective structures of democracy.
Her award-winning work has been published in leading venues, including New Media & Society, Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW). Her research has been cited by NPR, Nature, and Al Jazeera and presented at the White House, the United Nations General Assembly, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, the Council of Europe, and several national parliaments. Her book Crowdsourcing for Democracy (2012, Committee for the Future, Parliament of Finland; published in English and Finnish) introduced new models for engaging the public in democratic processes. She has designed and implemented several participatory democracy initiatives in collaboration with local and national governments and non-profit organizations in both the United States and Finland.
She is the recipient of prestigious grants and fellowships, including the Brown Fellowship at the Brown Institute for Media Innovation at Stanford University. Previously, Dr. Aitamurto has served as a visiting assistant professor at Northwestern University, Deputy Director at the Brown Institute for Media Innovation at Stanford University, and as a postdoctoral scholar with the Crowdsourced Democracy Team at Stanford’s School of Engineering. She earned her PhD in Social Sciences (Communication) from Tampere University, Finland, and holds two master’s degrees—one in Public Policy and another in Humanities—from the University of Jyväskylä.
Dr. Aitamurto frequently collaborates with media organizations and governments in in-the-wild studies. Prior to academia, she worked as a journalist specializing in military and defense reporting, covering conflict zones in Afghanistan, Angola, and Uganda. She has reported for Helsingin Sanomat, the Finnish Broadcasting Company YLE, and VentureBeat, and has taught journalism at the University of Zambia.
Bio (longer)
Tanja Aitamurto, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois Chicago, where she is the founding director of the Media/Democracy Lab. Her research centers on people—how individuals and communities engage with media, shape public life, and influence the collective structures of democracy.
Her work has received multiple awards and has been published in leading academic venues such as New Media & Society, Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW). She has presented her research at the White House, the United Nations, OECD, the Council of Europe, and several national parliaments and governments. Her work has also been cited by NPR, Nature, and Al Jazeera.
Aitamurto often conducts in-the-wild experiments in collaboration with media organizations as well as local and national governments. Before returning to academia, she worked as a journalist specializing in military and defense, reporting from countries including Afghanistan, Angola, and Uganda.
Previously, she served as Deputy Director at the Brown Institute for Media Innovation at Stanford University and as a postdoctoral scholar with the Crowdsourced Democracy Team at Stanford’s School of Engineering. During her doctoral studies, she was a visiting researcher at Stanford’s Program on Liberation Technology and the Center for Design Research, as well as at the Data and Democracy Initiative at the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) at UC Berkeley.
She earned her PhD in Social Sciences, majoring in Communication, from Tampere University, Finland, in 2014. She also holds a Master’s degree in Public Policy and a Master of Arts in Humanities from the University of Jyväskylä, Finland.
In her journalism career, Aitamurto reported for Finland’s leading daily newspaper Helsingin Sanomat and the Finnish Broadcasting Company YLE. She also taught journalism at the University of Zambia, worked at the Namibia Press Agency, and covered technology for VentureBeat, a Silicon Valley–based tech publication.
She occasionally participates directly in the phenomena she studies—for example, crowdfunding a research trip to Egypt in 2011 after the Arab Spring to examine crowdsourcing in public deliberation.