Jonas Fegert heads the House of Participation (HoP) at the FZI Research Center for Information Technology and leads the Digital Democracy & Participation research group at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). He completed his PhD at KIT in Information Systems, including a Visiting Scholarship at the University of Southern California. Previously, he studied Political Science, Governance, and Public Policy in Berlin, Friedrichshafen, and Porto Alegre, supported by ELES and the BMW Foundation, among others.
Fegert has been at FZI since 2019, as Department Head from 2021; he co-founded and built the HoP in 2024. His research combines Information Systems and computational social science; it addresses disinformation, deepfakes, platform governance, polarization, and digital citizen participation. AI is a cross-cutting theme, both as a research object and a methodological instrument. Fegert leads the projects TWON (European Commission), SOSEC (Landecker Foundation), DeFaktS, VIRTUS, kuKI (BMFTR), MuDDi (SPRIN-D), and DisCoBoard (BMFSFJ). He regularly brings research findings into policy and public administration.
From 2008 to 2014, he worked in the Bundestag, and from 2014 to 2018 as Senior Program Manager at ELES. He is engaged in the association Die Wirtschaftsinformatik and as a board member and faculty mentor (Vertrauensdozent) at ELES. He is a member of the Coalition for Pluralistic Public Discourse and an ROI Fellow of the Schusterman Foundation.