Ido Sivan-Sevilla (founder, PhD) is an assistant professor in UMD’s College of Information and affiliate professor in the School of Public Policy. He studies the governance of digital technologies, researching the design & implementation of tech policy issues through an array of methodologies including process-tracing analysis, computational text analysis, in-depth interviews, fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA), computational web scraping and vulnerability analysis, and social network analysis. For more information, see his website or email him directly.
Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia is an assistant professor at the College of Information at the University of Maryland College Park, where he leads the Computational Socio-dynamics Laboratory. He is interested in problems originating from the interplay between people and computing systems, in the determinants of information quality in cyberspace, and in how information propagates across social networks, with application to the integrity of information in cyberspace and the trustworthiness and reliability of social computing systems.
Dr. Irene Pasquetto is an assistant professor at the College of Information. Her research covers two main areas of inquiry, namely data governance (with a special focus on open data practices) and mis- and disinformation studies. She has also written about algorithmic fairness, digital labor, open science, data science and quantitative epistemologies, digital libraries, and the politics of genetic ancestry testing. Her work has been published in a number of academic venues in the fields of library and information science, science and technology studies, media studies and human-computer interaction.
Dr. Cody Buntain is an assistant professor at the College of Information. His work examines how people use online information spaces during crises and political unrest, with a focus on information quality. He is a research affiliate for NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics, where he studies online information and social media. His work in these areas has been covered by the New York Times, Washington Post, WIRED, Business Insider, and NBC. As an educator, Dr. Buntain’s teaching philosophy is driven by student leadership, bridging disciplines, and exploring the unconventional. His teaching experience spans several institutions, as he has developed and led four courses as an adjunct professor at American University (AU) and UMD and led the updating of three courses at NJIT. Prior to earning his PhD, Dr. Buntain ran the research division for a small defense contractor that specializes in cybersecurity.
Parthav Poudel is a Computer Science major and Cybersecurity minor at the University of Maryland, Class of 2026, and a recipient of the Department of Defense SMART Scholarship. He has gained experience through internships at The MITRE Corporation and UMD’s Applied Research Laboratory for Intelligence and Security (ARLIS), where he worked on utilizing large language models for legacy software translation and data processing projects for government clients. Parthav also conducts research at UMD’s College of Information, focusing on data infrastructure, web privacy, and misinformation outlets. He is involved in building scalable web crawling solutions and analyzing large datasets to inform cybersecurity and misinformation policy.
