Deena Abul-Fottouh is a computational social scientist. Her research investigates how social media data can guide our understanding of various societal problems including online misinformation, anti-social behavior such as hate speech, digital activism, and the use of social media in teaching and learning. She is currently the project lead of McMaster’s Global Nexus Task Force on Contexts, Evidence, and Behaviours. Deena uses computational techniques of social network analysis, natural language processing, and data science to study the social impacts of COVID-19. In particular, she studies online misinformation about the pandemic, hate speech related to online vaccination debate, and social inequality manifested in the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on marginalized groups.

Before coming to McMaster, Deena has been teaching human centered data science at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information. Deena has completed her PhD at McMaster University with Dr. Tina Fetner on Twitter networks of Egyptian activists during the Arab Spring. During this time, she was a recipient of the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship. After completing her PhD, she got certified in data analytics, big data, and predictive analytics from Ryerson University. She has worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Ryerson University’s Social Media Lab. Deena has also worked as a Senior Research Specialist with the United Nations Development Programme. Her work has been published in various journals including International Journal of Medical Informatics, Policy and Internet, and Computer Supported Cooperative Work.  

Areas of interest:  Computational Social Sciences, Online Misinformation, Online Anti-social Behaviour, Human Centered Data Science.