Jennifer Allen

Jennifer Allen will join the NYU Stern School of Business in Fall 2025 as an Assistant Professor of Technology, Operations, and Statistics. She will also serve as Core Faculty for NYU's Center for Social Media and Politics.

Allen is a computational social scientist interested in digital persuasion, misinformation, and the wisdom of crowds. She is currently finishing her PhD in Marketing at MIT Sloan School of Management advised by David Rand, where she is also affiliated with the MIT Initiative for the Digital Economy. Allen will spend the 2024-25 academic year as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Pennsylvania’s Computational Social Science Lab before joining NYU the following year.

Allen's research uses computational methods and real-world data to study how digital media contributes to societal problems, and how we can design scalable solutions. In her dissertation work, Allen combine experiments, crowdsourcing, and natural-language-processing to quantify the impact that COVID vaccine (mis)information on Facebook had on U.S. vaccine refusal.

Prior to her PhD, Allen worked as a software engineer at Meta on the News and Civic teams, and then as a research assistant at Microsoft Research with the Computational Social Science Group. Before that, she graduated from Yale in 2016 with a degree in Computer Science and Psychology.