Mike Kearney is an assistant professor at the University of Missouri where he holds a joint appointment in the School of Journalism and the Informatics Institute. His research examines the spread of political information through digital media using computational social scientific methods. Kearney earned his Ph.D. in communication studies along with a graduate minor in social and behavioral sciences methodology at the University of Kansas. He has published research in peer-reviewed journals, including New Media & Society, Information, Communication and Society, Computers in Human Behavior, etc. Kearney’s work has been featured by mainstream outlets such as The Washington Post, The Guardian, MSNBC, Esquire and MarketWatch.

Dr. Kearney is also the creator of several open source computational tools, including the R package rtweet, a peer-reviewed and leading (140,000+ downloads) open-source solution for collecting and analyzing Twitter data. As part of his joint appointment in Missouri’s Informatics Institute, he also teaches courses for the Data Science and Analytics M.S. degree program on topics such as social media analytics, text mining, network analysis, and statistics.