Sarah Gilbert

Research Director, CAT Lab, Communication

Research Associate, Communication

About

Dr. Sarah Gilbert (she/her/hers) is a research associate Cornell University and Research Manager of the Citizens and Technology Lab. Her work focuses on understanding and designing healthy online communities, studying topics like what influences participation, how people learn in online communities, how volunteer moderators’ labor impacts community governance, and how research in those areas can be done ethically. Prior to joining Cornell, she was a postdoctoral associate at the University of Maryland, College Park and earned her doctorate in Library and Information Studies from the University of British Columbia. Her work has been published in ACM CSCW (PACM-HCI), Social Media + Society, New Media & Society; and Information, Communication & Society, and has been featured in The Atlantic.

Recent Research

Lenhart, A., Gilbert, S., & Shilton, K. (2024, March). CONTENTR: An Experiential Game for Teaching Value Tradeoffs in Social Media Governance. In Proceedings of the 55th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 1 (pp. 722-728).
Fiesler, C., Zimmer, M., Proferes, N., Gilbert, S., & Jones, N. (2024). Remember the human: A systematic review of ethical considerations in reddit research. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 8(GROUP), 1-33.
Gilbert, S. (2023). Towards intersectional moderation: An alternative model of moderation built on care and power. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 7(CSCW2), 1-32.
Gilbert, S., Shilton, K., & Vitak, J. (2023). When research is the context: Cross-platform user expectations for social media data reuse. Big Data & Society, 10(1), 20539517231164108.
Shilton, K., Moss, E., Gilbert, S. A., Bietz, M. J., Fiesler, C., Metcalf, J., ... & Zimmer, M. (2021). Excavating awareness and power in data science: A manifesto for trustworthy pervasive data research. Big Data & Society, 8(2), 20539517211040759.
Gilbert, S., Vitak, J., & Shilton, K. (2021). Measuring Americans’ comfort with research uses of their social media data. Social Media+ Society, 7(3), 20563051211033824.
Proferes, N., Jones, N., Gilbert, S., Fiesler, C., & Zimmer, M. (2021). Studying reddit: A systematic overview of disciplines, approaches, methods, and ethics. Social Media+ Society, 7(2), 20563051211019004.
Palacin, V., Gilbert, S., Orchard, S., Eaton, A., Ferrario, M. A., & Happonen, A. (2020). Drivers of participation in digital citizen science: Case Studies on Järviwiki and safecast. Citizen Science: Theory and Practice, 5(1).
Gilbert, S. A. (2020). " I run the world's largest historical outreach project and it's on a cesspool of a website." Moderating a Public Scholarship Site on Reddit: A Case Study of r/AskHistorians. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 4(CSCW1), 1-27.

Contact Information

sag284 [at] cornell.edu

Sarah in the news

News

September 30, 2026

COMM Updates - 9/30/2026

September 30, 2026 Awards Professor Jeff Niederdeppe received the Outstanding Health Communication Scholar Award from the Health Communication Division of the National Communication Association. The award recognizes a significant and original...

News

September 24, 2026

COMM Updates - 9/24/2026

September 24, 2026 Conferences Professor Lee Humphreys was a panel participant in the “Oral Histories of Mobile Communication” conference. How has the mobile phone impacted our lives? The Oral Histories of Mobile Communication project documents...