Dr Max Falkenberg is an AI+ Senior Research Fellow (tenure track Senior Lecturer / UK Associate Professor) in the Department of Informatics and the Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and an Associate Academic in the Department of Political Economy.

He received his PhD in Physics from Imperial College London. After his PhD, he held a postdoctoral research position in computational social science at City, University of London, a visiting research fellowship at the Institute for Sustainable Resources at University College London, and most recently was PI of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellowship project POLARCLIMATE in the Department of Network & Data Science at the Central European University in Vienna, Austria.

His work has been covered extensively in the media including in The Guardian, The Times, The Spectator, Bloomberg, El Pais in Spain, RAI TV in Italy and on BBC World Service Radio. He has been interviewed by the BBC, The Times, Bloomberg and on TV for TVP World, the Polish state broadcaster. He has provided bespoke data analysis to The Times and AFP Paris on climate scepticism online. He has presented his work at multiple international conferences, and to industry and policy makers including at Spotify, the Cambridge Disinformation Summit, The Bank of England and at The World Bank in Paris.

Research Interests

Dr Falkenberg's research applies tools from network science, statistical inference, and AI to problems in computational social science. In particular, he works with social surveys, social media, and other datasets on socio-political communication (newspapers, political speeches) to study problems related to the structure of attitudes, values, and identities, and how different types of political polarization manifest across on- and offline domains. He is also broadly interested in problems related to climate change, including climate communication and politics, and climate finance. His research has been published in leading academic journals (Nature Climate Change, Nature Communications, PNAS Nexus) and he is Associate Deputy Editor of the journal Climatic Change.

Dr Falkenberg has a particular interest in science policy having written articles for political think-tanks and for the LSE climate blog. He has also written an op-ed in The Banker (by the Financial Times) on why fossil fuel phase out from the banking sector has failed thus far. During his PhD, he spent three months as a policy analyst working in the UK Houses of Parliament for the EFRA Select Committee.

Further Information

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