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Rising Star Faculty Award 2026: J. Nathan Matias

Bio

Dr. J. Nathan Matias is a computer scientist and social scientist who organizes citizen behavioral science for a safer, fairer, more understanding Internet. A Guatemalan American, Nathan is an associate professor in the Cornell University Department of Communication and field member in Information Science.

Nathan is founder of the Citizens and Technology Lab, a public-interest research group at Cornell that organizes citizen behavioral science and behavioral consumer protection research for digital life. CAT Lab has worked with communities of tens of millions of people on reddit, Wikipedia and Twitter to test ideas for preventing harassment, broadening gender diversity on social media, responding to human/algorithmic misinformation, managing political conflict and auditing social technologies.

Each year, Nathan teaches classes that reach almost a tenth of Cornell students with opportunities to link their passion for technology and design with enduring questions in work, families and civic life. In 2024, he received the George D. Levy Engaged Teaching and Research Award from Cornell for classes that support students to partner with leading nonprofits on technology research that makes a difference.

Nathan is also a pioneer in industry-independent evaluations on the impact of social technologies and artificial intelligence in society. Toward this end, he co-founded the Coalition for Independent Technology Research, a nonprofit that supports and defends independent research on technology and society.

Nathan is spending 2026-2027 as a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University and the Grefenstette Center for Ethics in Science, Technology, and the Law at Duquesne University. He has also held positions at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, the Princeton University Center for Information Technology Policy, and the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University. Nathan did his PhD at the MIT Center for Civic Media and MIT Media Lab. Before MIT, Nathan worked in tech startups that have reached hundreds of millions of phones, helped start a series of education and journalistic charities, and studied English/postcolonial literature at the University of Cambridge and Elizabethtown College.

Nathan has received numerous honors in academia, industry, journalism and nonprofits. In 2023, he was awarded the Mozilla Rise25 award for research and policy work for a fairer, more ethical Internet. He is recipient of the Nelson Award from the Association for Computer Machinery and the Linda Tischler Award from FastCompany, where his work has been honored twice in the Innovation by Design awards. 

Nathan’s journalism has been published in The Atlantic, PBS, the Guardian, FiveThirtyEight, Global Voices, Boston Magazine, Adventure Cyclist and other international media. His work is regularly covered by international media, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, NPR All Things Considered, WIRED, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Boston Globe, Canadian Broadcasting Company, FastCompany, Fortune, Chronicle of Higher Education, Nieman Journalism Review and the Columbia Journalism Review, to name a few.