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Emma S. Spiro is an Associate Professor at the University of Washington Information School, holding adjunct associate professor appointments in the Department of Sociology and the Department of Human Centered Design and Engineering. She serves as Faculty Director of the Center for an Informed Public (CIP), which she co-founded in 2019 to resist strategic misinformation and strengthen democratic discourse, and co-directs the Data Science and Analytics Lab (DataLab) at the iSchool. Additionally, she is an affiliate of the Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences, a research affiliate of the Center for Studies of Demography and Ecology, and a Data Science Fellow at the eScience Institute. Spiro earned her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Irvine in 2013, M.A. in Mathematical Behavioral Sciences from UCI in 2011, and dual B.A. degrees in Mathematics and Science, Technology, and Society from Pomona College in 2007.

Dr. Spiro's research specializations encompass social networks, crisis informatics, and misinformation, with a focus on online communication and information behaviors during crisis events, including rumors, information manipulation, and collective sensemaking. Her work, funded by the National Science Foundation and the Army Research Office, has appeared in PNAS, Science Advances, Social Networks, Demography, Field Methods, Information, Communication & Society, and premier conferences such as ICWSM, CHI, and CSCW. Key publications include "ElectionRumors2022: A Dataset of Election Rumors on Twitter During the 2022 U.S. Midterms" (2025, Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media), "Selective and Deceptive Citation in the Construction of Dueling Consensuses" (2023, Science Advances), "Rumors Have Rules" (2023, Issues in Science and Technology), and "Echo Chambers in the Age of Algorithms: An Audit of Twitter's Friend Recommender System" (2024, ACM Web Science Conference). Spiro has received the Best Paper Award at the 10th International Conference on Social Computing and Social Media (2018), Best Poster Award at the 2nd Annual International Conference on Computational Social Science (2016), Lee Dirks Best Paper Finalist at iConference (2017), and Top 30 Thinkers Under 30 by Pacific Standard Magazine (2014). Her career at UW began as Acting Assistant Professor in 2013, advancing to Assistant Professor (2014-2020) and Associate Professor (2020-present). She teaches courses such as INFO 300 Research Methods, INFX 573 Data Science I, and INFX 576 Social Network Analysis.