Christian Sandvig

Christian Sandvig is a researcher investigating the consequences of algorithmic systems that curate and organize culture. His approach, termed "infrastructure studies," spans science, technology, social research, and design. His projects have addressed social media, wireless systems, broadband Internet, online video, domain names, and Internet policy.

Sandvig is also a computer programmer and interaction designer with previous experience at a Fortune 500 company, a regional government, and a San Francisco Bay Area software start-up. Quotations, interviews, and articles about Sandvig's research have appeared in stories in/on The Economist, The New York Times, NPR, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Guardian, the BBC, Le Monde, and other media outlets. His group blog was recently named one of the "Must-Follow Feeds" in science, culture, and design by Wired.

He has published over 50 journal articles, book chapters, and papers in conference proceedings, receiving top paper or similar awards from venues (including ACM CHI, ICA CAT, AEJMC, ICWSM, SCMS, and TPRC). His work has been translated into French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Hungarian. Sandvig was previously named a "next-generation leader in science and technology policy" in a faculty competition organized by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He received the US National Science Foundation CAREER award in the area of Human-Centered Computing.

At Michigan, Sandvig is also appointed as a professor in the School of Information; in the Department of Communication Studies in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts; and in the Center for Political Studies at the Institute for Social Research.

Before moving to Michigan, Sandvig was Assistant and Associate Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he founded the Center for People & Infrastructures. In addition, he served as Markle Foundation Information Policy Fellow at the Programme in Comparative Media Law and Policy, Oxford University. Sandvig has been a visiting research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, associate fellow in Socio-Legal Studies (a research centre of the Oxford Law Faculty), visiting scholar in Art History & Communication Studies at McGill University, visiting professor at Intel Research, visiting scholar at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a Fellow of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.