Professor Helen Margetts OBE FBA

Helen Margetts OBE FBA is Professor of Society and the Internet at the University of Oxford, and Senior Adviser and Visiting Professor at LSE’s Data Science Institute. From 2018 to 2025, she founded and directed the Public Policy Programme at the Alan Turing Institute for Data Science and AI, which gained national and international recognition for its pioneering work on AI and government. From 2011 to 2018, she was Director of the Oxford Internet Institute a multi-disciplinary department of the University of Oxford, before which she was Professor of Political Science and Director of the School of Public Policy at UCL.

She has researched and written extensively about the relationship between technology, politics, public policy and government including over 150 articles and six books on the topic, including Digital Era Governance (OUP, 2008) and Data Science, AI and the Third Wave of Digital Governance (OUP, forthcoming). Her book Political Turbulence: How Social Media Shape Collective Action (Princeton University Press) won the Political Studies Association’s W.J.Mackenzie prize for best politics book in 2017.

Public service appointments include the Home Office Scientific Advisory Council (HOSAC, from 2019) and the United Nation Committee of Experts on Public Administration (CEPA, from 2025). She was awarded 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).