Institut for Kommunikation og Kultur

About Anja Bechmann

Anja Bechmann (she/her) is professor at Media Studies and director of the interdisciplinary research center DATALAB - Center for Digital Social Research at Aarhus University in Denmark. Her research examines digital and social media communication and collective behavior using large-scale data collection and applied machine learning. She is Chief Investigator (CI) of the EU project NORDIS, executive board member of the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO), and appointed member of the Academy of Technical Sciences. She has been a member of the EU Commission High-level expert group on disinformation and is continously invited as an independent academic to provide research-based talks, white papers or comments on drafts by e.g., European Parliament, Ministry of Defense, and Ministry of Culture. In 2019 she was appointed Thinker in Residence by the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts. Her research has been funded by national and international research councils such as the Danish Council for Independent Research, Swedish Research Council, Danish Agency for Science and Innovation, Horizon 2020, EU CEF, and Aarhus University Research Foundation.

Disclosure of financial ties to the industry:

In 2022 Bechmann has not herself received project funding from tech industries but has received a data grant from Social Science One in 2022 providing access to carry out analysis on Facebook data from EU and US. Furthermore, Facebook invited and funded her participation expenses in Social Science Foo Camp 2018, an Information meeting in Berlin about their upcoming oversight board and about their research data access solution in Amsterdam and Paris. EDMO was offered 25 mio euro by Google but kindly declined the generous offer due to the need for independent scrutiny of tech industry players and instead Bechmann along with other EDMO executive and advisory board members helped craft an independent foundation (European Information and Media Fund - EMIF) where other researchers and journalist alike can apply for project funding. Bechmann furthermore is an independent board member of Jyllands-Postens Foundation and Jyllands-Postens Holding and former board member of Nordjyske Holding and Aalborg Stiftstidendes Foundation.

CV Anja Bechmann