Philipp Lorenz-Spreen

Dr. Philipp Lorenz-Spreen is a network scientist at the Center for Adaptive Rationality of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin. He is interested in how and why information spreads via social media, and more generally, in the impact of modern information systems on our society and on the public domain. To that end, he analyzes large data sets from social media and other sources. This allows quantitative access to human behavior at the societal level and across large time spans.

Dr. Lorenz-Spreen’s current research centers on the question of how individual choice environments can be changed to translate into positive collective effects of quality information distribution. He is experimentally testing ways to computationally extract meaningful cues for the quality of online information and make them more accessible to large numbers of users.

He completed his PhD on empirical methods and theoretical models for describing the dynamics of collective attention from online data sets at the Technische Universität Berlin. At the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, he studied physics, focusing on systems biophysics.