Eric Chen, Ph.D.

Eric Chen is the Director of the Media and Community Lab, a new lab at the Columbia Journalism School’s Brown Institute for Media Innovation. The lab operates as a research and development hub bridging scholarship and practice, with a focus on strengthening social cohesion and democratic processes.

Prior to joining Columbia three years ago, Eric worked in trust and safety at Facebook/Meta, where he helped lead global election integrity and armed-conflict crisis response research and product initiatives. His work centered on mitigating large-scale offline harm, including misinformation and incitement to violence, and on improving how Meta’s products, policies, and operations supported essential community needs in conflict zones and fragile states.

Eric earned his Ph.D. from the University of California, Irvine, where his research focused on political and moral psychology, particularly political ideology, polarization, and their effects on human cognition and behavior. He has also worked as an independent filmmaker and began his career as a software engineer. As an undergraduate at Harvard University, he studied computer science while actively engaging in political activism.