Sarah Gilbert
Research Manager, CAT Lab, Communication
Postdoctoral Associate, Communication

Dr. Sarah Gilbert (she/her/hers) is a postdoctoral 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
- 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
Conferences & Invited Lectures Professor Bruce Lewenstein delivered the paper “Core Competencies for Communicating Basic Science” at the SciPEP workshop on equipping scientists to communicate about basic research, which was co-sponsored by the...
- Department of Communication

News
- Department of Communication