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

Beatrys Rodrigues presents on a stage in front of a screen

News

April 8, 2026

COMM Updates - 4/8/2026

April 8, 2026 Awards Graduate student Rosie Nguyen received the Diverse Knowledge East Asia Fellowship from the Einaudi Center for International Studies. The fellowship is part of the East Asia Program’s Area Studies Fellowships, which support...

News

September 17, 2025

COMM Updates - 9/17/2025

September 17, 2025 Awards Professor danah boyd received an Honorable Mention, Star-Nelkin Best Paper Award from the American Sociology Science, Knowledge, and Technology Section. The award is in recognition of her co-authored article “ The...