Jaigris Hodson

Jaigris Hodson, PhD, is an Associate Professor in Interdisciplinary Studies and a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Digital Communication for the Public Interest at Royal Roads University. A former MITACS Science Policy Fellow with Environment and Climate Change Canada, she is currently a Resident Fellow with the Cascade Institute, a Research Advisory member of the Clarity Foundation, and a research collaborator with the Social Media Lab.

Hodson’s current research aims to understand, broadly, anti-social online behavior, including online polarization, harassment and misinformation, by adopting a systems view of these issues and how they work together. She is an internationally recognized expert on online harassment and ways to mitigate it, and has worked with the Conversation Canada and the Conversation UK to develop initiatives to help researchers who face harassment when they communicate their work in highly polarized and misinformation-rich environments. For this and related work, she has received over 1 million dollars in grant funding over the last five years.

In addition to her primary research program, Dr. Hodson is deeply engaged with how health information can be better communicated to the public. She has worked with researchers at UBC, the Clarity Foundation, and Health Quality BC to assist health professionals in fighting misinformation they encounter during their practice. She has published articles in high impact journals about the role digital technologies play in spreading information and misinformation about cancer and COVID-19, and she has become a highly sought-after speaker on matters of digital misinformation in political and health contexts.

Hodson founded the DPI collective a venue to connect early career researchers working in areas of public interest to one another and to more senior scholars in the space. Together the DPI collective works to mobilize important knowledge on the topics of digital misinformation, digital culture, education, and online harassment. They also regularly produce podcasts to share the work of scholars beyond the collective.

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