About
Helen Margetts OBE FBA FAcSS is Director of the LSE Data Science Institute, and Professor of Political Science and Public Policy in the Department of Government.
Professor Margetts joined LSE from the University of Oxford, where she was Professor of Society and the Internet at the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) from 2004, serving as its director from 2011 to 2018. During her directorship, Professor Margetts doubled the size of the OII and established it as a world-class centre of scholarship and methodological innovation. Professor Margetts remains a Senior Research Fellow at Mansfield College.
From 2018 to 2025 Professor Margetts founded and directed the Public Policy Programme at The Alan Turing Institute for Data Science and AI. The Programme's research created innovative AI models to improve productivity in the public sector, shaped policymaking across the Global South, informed landmark legislation like the Online Safety Act, and influenced global approaches to AI governance.
Professor Margetts was also University College London's first Professor of Political Science and Director of its School of Public Policy, which she transformed into a leading institution that went on to achieve worldwide impact in both research and teaching on political science and public policy.
She has researched and written extensively about the relationship between technology, politics, public policy, and government, publishing over 150 articles and six books, including Political Turbulence: how social media shape collective action (Princeton University Press) which won the Political Studies Association’s WJM Mackenzie prize for best politics book in 2017. She is currently completing her seventh book, AI and Digital Era Governance, which examines how government’s capabilities, position within society, and ability to meet external challenges are all critically shaped by digital change.
Professor Margetts has served on numerous public service bodies, including the United Nations Committee of Experts on Public Administration (from 2025) and the Home Office Scientific Advisory Council (2019–2026). She was awarded an OBE for services to social and political science in the 2019 New Year's Honours List, made a Fellow of the British Academy in July 2019, and was elected as a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in 2011.
Other recognitions include the Mayer-Struckmann prize by the Heinrich Heine University, Dusseldorf for outstanding research on digitization and democratization (2020); the John F Kluge Senior Chair in Technology and Society at the Library of Congress (2019); and the Friedrich Schiedel prize by the Technical University of Munich for research and research leadership in technology and politics (2018).