Gregory Asmolov is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Russia Institute, King’s College London. His work focuses on how information technologies, specifically social media and crowdsourcing platforms, constitute the role of individual users and crowds in crisis situations. His current research project explores how digital platforms change the everyday lives of users who are remote from a zone of conflict, and how information technologies contribute to the participation of their users in warfare. His additional research interests include disinformation and social polarization, and the role of digital networks in the emergence of alternative socio-political spaces.
Gregory Asmolov started his career as a journalist. He has worked as a Middle East correspondent for Russian newspapers Kommersant and Novaya Gazeta, and served as a news editor and security analyst for Israeli TV. Later, he has consulted on media development and social media projects for The World Bank and Internews Network. He also served as a contributing editor of RuNet Echo, a project of Global Voices Online analyzing the Russian Internet.
In 2010 Gregory Asmolov co-founded a “Help Map” – a crowdsourcing platform used to coordinate assistance to victims of wildfires in Russia. The project received a number of national and International prizes including Russian National Internet Award.
Asmolov served as a visiting lecturer at Media and Communication department at the Higher School of Economics (Moscow), conducted research as a visiting scholar at the Annenberg School for Communication at University of Pennsylvania, and worked as a research assistant at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University.
He holds a BA in Communication and International Affairs from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, an MA in Global Communication from George Washington University, and PhD in Media and Communications from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).