Lisa Merten is a Senior Researcher at the Leibniz Institute for Media Research | Hans-Bredow-Institut, where she has worked since 2015. Since 2026, she leads the research group on Media Use and Societal Effects (MUSE). She also serves as the institute’s Officer for Early Career Researcher Development, acting as the central contact person for doctoral and postdoctoral researchers and representing their interests within the institute.
Her research examines how digital information use relates to changes in political opinion formation. Her current work focuses on affective and issue-related polarization, trust in algorithmically and AI-mediated information environments, and the role of AI in journalism. Methodologically, she specializes in mixed-method approaches and computational social science, including web tracking, data donations, longitudinal surveys, digital trace data, automated content analysis, and qualitative approaches.
As principal investigator and project coordinator, Lisa leads the interdisciplinary international computational social science project “Political Polarization and Individualized Online Information Environments: A Longitudinal Tracking Study (POLTRACK)”. The collaborative project between HBI, GESIS, the University of Bremen, and Aalto University investigates how individuals’ information environments and political attitudes develop in relation to one another over time. It combines longitudinal web-tracking and panel-survey data with automated analyses of the information content participants encounter online.
Building on this work, Lisa leads the German-Australian cooperation project “Mapping Polarization in News Media Content” together with researchers at the Digital Media Research Centre at Queensland University of Technology. The project develops computational approaches to identify potentially polarizing features of news coverage and compares the thematic and ideological positioning of news outlets in Germany and Australia. By linking content analyses with POLTRACK survey and tracking data, the project examines how exposure to potentially polarizing news relates to changes in political attitudes.
Lisa also conducted research in the DFG project “Public Connection”, examining how people connect to different publics through media use and communicative practices. As co-PI of the subproject “Media Use and Social Cohesion” at the Research Institute Social Cohesion, she studied the relationship between digital media use and social cohesion, including research on political influencers and their potential to reach audiences with comparatively little information-oriented social media use.
Lisa has extensive experience in interdisciplinary and international collaborative research and in the development and coordination of externally funded research projects. She has taught computational methods, digital media research, and communication science at the Universities of Hamburg, Bremen, Augsburg, and Konstanz, as well as Kiel University of Applied Sciences.
Career Path
Lisa received her doctorate in Communication Science from Universität Hamburg in 2022, graduating summa cum laude. Her cumulative dissertation examined practices of news and information use on social networking platforms. One of her dissertation articles, which examined practices of personal news curation on social media using data from the Reuters Institute Digital News Survey, was named Article of the Year 2021 by Digital Journalism.
In the summer semester of 2021, Lisa substituted part-time for an Assistant Professorship in Computational Social Science at the Center for Data and Methods at the University of Konstanz.
Lisa studied communication science at Leipzig University and TU Dresden and spent study periods at the University of Amsterdam and Boston University, supported by a scholarship from the German Academic Scholarship Foundation (Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes). During and after her studies, she gained professional experience in market and media research, including at the Sinus Institute, ZDF Media Research, Gruner + Jahr, and mindline, as well as in Elizabeth Warren’s election campaign.
