Lisa Merten has been working as a researcher at the Leibniz Institute for Media Research | Hans-Bredow-Institut (HBI) in Research Program 1 “Transformation of Public Communication – Journalistic and Intermediary Functions in the Process of Opinion Formation” since 2015. Her research interests include media use in digital media environments, especially with regard to the reception and effects of information-oriented media offerings, personalisation processes in publics shaped by algorithms and the development of digital methods.
As principal investigator and project coordinator, Lisa is currently leading the computational social science project “Political polarization and individualized online information environments: A longitudinal tracking study (POLTRACK)” investigating the interplay of individual information repertoires and the polarization of political opinions over time. In this collaborative project between the HBI, GESIS, and the Universities of Bremen and Konstanz, they collect tracking and survey data from online panelists and conduct automated online analysis of the media content seen by the panelists.
In addition, in the DFG project “Public Connection” Lisa and her colleagues are investigating how users connect to different publics through the way they use media and other communicative practices.
Lisa was co-PI at the Research Institute Social Cohesion in the subproject “Media Use and Social Cohesion”. Together with Hannah Immler she ran a network and content analysis of Instagram accounts to examine whether and how political influencers in social media can reach populations without much information-oriented social media use.
In the summer semester of 2021, she substituted an assistant professor of Computational Social Science at the Center for Data and Methods at the University of Konstanz on a part-time basis. She has also taught at the Universität Hamburg, University of Augsburg, and Kiel University of Applied Sciences.
Career Path
Her cumulative dissertation project at Universität Hamburg focused on practices of news use on social networking platforms. Her dissertation article on practices of personal news curation on social media based on data from the Reuters Institute Digital News Survey named Article of the Year 2021 by Digital Journalism.
Lisa studied communication science at the University of Leipzig, at the TU Dresden as well as at the Universiteit van Amsterdam and Boston University with a scholarship from the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes. After and during her studies, she worked in market and media research (e.g. Sinus Institute, ZDF Media Research, Gruner & Jahr, mindline, election campaign Elisabeth Warren for Massachusetts).
![Screenshot of an article on the Verfassungsblog. Title of the article: “Ein rundfunkrechtliches ‘Solange’?” [An “As Long As" in Broadcasting Law?]](https://leibniz-hbi-de.b-cdn.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Verfassungsblog-Mast-Schulz-OeRR.jpg)
