Onur Varol

Dr. Onur Varol is an Assistant Professor at the Sabanci University Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences and Principal Investigator at the VIRAL Lab. His research focuses on developing techniques to analyze online behaviors to improve individual well-being and address societal problems using online data. He is awarded by The Turkish Science Academy to Young Scientist Awards (2022) and Research Incentive Award by METU Parlar Foundation (2022). He also received TUBITAK 2247-D National Leader Researcher Grant in 2022. Prior to joining Sabanci University, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Northeastern University at the Center for Complex Network Research. He completed his PhD in Informatics at Indiana University, Bloomington (USA). His thesis focuses on the analysis of manipulation and threats on social media and he was awarded the 2018 University Distinguished Ph.D. Dissertation Award. He has developed a system called Botometer to detect social bots on Twitter and his team ranked top 3 worldwide at the 2015 DARPA Bot Detection Challenge. His research published in prestigious venues such as International Conference of Web and Social Media (ICWSM), Nature Communications, Nature Human Behavior,World Wide Web (WWW) conference, and Communications of the ACM.
http://www.onurvarol.com/