Who we are.

Aengus Bridgman directs the Media Ecosystem Observatory and coordinates the Canadian Digital Media Research Network. He works on misinformation, digital activism, and the politics of digital media, with research in the Journal of Politics, Party Politics, and the Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review. He built MEO's election monitoring program, which has covered every Canadian federal and several provincial elections since 2019.

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Zeynep Pehlivan leads the digital trace team — the crawlers, the standardization pipeline, and the cross-platform panel that the data product serves. She holds a PhD in Computer Science from Université Pierre et Marie Curie and spent seven years as a research engineer at France's Institut national de l'audiovisuel, working on social media archiving and information propagation in the French media landscape.

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Saewon Park leads data strategy at MEO, connecting the collection infrastructure to the research questions it has to answer and to the researchers who request access. She holds a master's in Political Science from McGill and previously worked as a business intelligence analyst in the technology industry.

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Mika Desblancs-Patel is a research engineer at MEO, working on large-scale collection and the computational methods applied to it. He holds a master's in Cognitive Science from the University of Edinburgh and a BA in Computer Science and Philosophy from McGill, and has published on account bans on Twitter and political bias in YouTube's recommendation system.

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Ben Steel is a research engineer at MEO and a PhD student in Computer Science at McGill's Network Dynamics Lab. He studies how opinions form and change, and what role platforms play in that process, building the computational tools that make those patterns observable. He was previously a data engineer at Ubisoft.

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David Hobson is a research engineer working across MEO and the Centre. He holds an MSc in Computer Science from McGill, where he built computational narrative frameworks for characterizing how people are portrayed in the news; that work has been presented at EMNLP. He was previously a data scientist at Global Affairs Canada.

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Mathieu Lavigne leads MEO's analytics team, which sets the analytical strategy behind the tracking survey and the ecosystem briefs. He holds a PhD in Political Science from McGill and was a postdoctoral fellow in Quantitative Social Science at Dartmouth College. His work on misinformation and democratic resilience appears in Public Opinion Quarterly, Party Politics, and the Canadian Journal of Political Science, among others.

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Esli Chan is a senior analyst at MEO and a PhD candidate in Political Science at McGill. Her research covers extremism, far-right politics, gender ideology, and disinformation, with a focus on how women are recruited into far-right movements. Her work has appeared in Violence Against Women and the Harvard Women's Policy Journal.

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Chris Ross is a senior analyst at MEO, working on the national tracking survey that runs alongside the digital trace collection. He holds an MA in Political Science from McGill, where his research focused on support for climate policy in Canada.

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Diya Jiang is a senior analyst at MEO and a PhD candidate in Political Science at McGill. Her research covers trade and Canada–US relations, alongside Canada's digital media environment. Her work has appeared in Publius: The Journal of Federalism, the Canadian Journal of Political Science, and the Canadian Foreign Policy Journal.

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Eric Merkley directs the Policy, Elections, and Representation Lab (PEARL) at the University of Toronto — MEO's partner on the national tracking survey — and was previously MEO's lead survey analyst. He works on political communication, public opinion, and mass polarization, with research in the American Political Science Review, Nature Human Behaviour, and the Journal of Politics. He is the author of Polarization, Eh? The Causes and Consequences of Affective Polarization in Canada (University of Toronto Press).

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Jérémie Drouin is a PhD student in political science at the University of Toronto and a research fellow at the Policy, Elections, and Representation Lab (PEARL), working on MEO's national tracking survey. His research is on media effects — how coverage shapes party and public priorities, how it conditions information processing, and its role in elite and affective polarization. He holds a master’s and a bachelor’s in political science from Université Laval.

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Bradley Wood-MacLean is a PhD student at the University of Toronto and a research fellow at the Media Ecosystem Observatory and the Policy, Elections, and Representation Lab (PEARL). His research sits at the crossroads of political behaviour, political communication, and political economy, with a focus on immigration and the urban–rural divide. His work has been published in the Canadian Journal of Political Science, The Conversation, and elsewhere.

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Danielle Bohonos is a doctoral fellow at MEO, working on the election monitoring research, and a research fellow at the Policy, Elections, and Representation Lab (PEARL) at the University of Toronto. Her research covers the rise of far-right and populist movements in Canada and the networks that carry those ideas across North America, along with rural resentment, western alienation, and declining trust in political institutions. She did her master’s and bachelor’s in political science at McGill.

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