Dr Milena Tsvetkova

"My work is interdisciplinary and combines theories and methods from sociology, social psychology, behavioural economics, network science, and computer science. I have collaborated with computer scientists, physicists, a philosopher, a management scholar, a mathematician, and an ecologist. I am also particularly proud of working closely and publishing together with LSE students."
- Dr Milena Tsvetkova reflects on the prominent themes of her research as part of our 30th Anniversary celebrations. Read the full close-up with Methodology faculty.

Milena Tsvetkova is an Associate Professor in the Department of Methodology. She completed her PhD in Sociology at Cornell University in 2015. Prior to joining LSE in 2017, she was a Postdoctoral Researcher in Computational Social Science at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford.

Research interests

Milena’s research interests lie in the fields of computational and experimental social science. She is the director of the HUMANET lab, funded by the ERC Consolidator grant with €2,000,000 in 2025–2030 to study networks and communities comprised of humans and intelligent machines such as algorithms and bots. Leading an interdisciplinary team of research assistants, postdocs, and external scholars, Milena is investigating how human-machine, machine-machine, and human-human interactions differ and how they affect collective outcomes such as coordination, cooperation, and social contagion. The research combines theories form social psychology, network sociology, human-computer interaction, and AI and employs large-scale online experiments, network analysis, data mining, and agent-based modeling.

Expertise

Computational social science; Online experiments; Network analysis; Agent based modeling; Cooperation; Collective behavior; Sociology; Social psychology; Human-computer interaction.