Chris Wells

Chris Wells, affiliated faculty with the Boston University Institute for Global Sustainability (IGS), is an Associate Professor in the College of Communication and a founding member of the Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences at Boston University. He is also project lead for the Focused Research Program on data and misinformation jointly sponsored by IGS.

Wells is a political communication scholar who has innovated techniques of computational social science in the field of communication. He is interested in how communication about public issues takes place, which actors have the power to shape discourse about particular topics, and how public discourse is translated, or not translated, into political action. He has published multiple articles about the workings of the American media system and the spread of disinformation after the 2016 US election, including how disinformation from Russia’s Internet Research Agency (IRA) on social media wound up appearing in US news media, research that was cited in the Mueller Report.