Jonas Fegert heads the House of Participation (HoP) at the FZI Research Center for Information Technology and leads the joint Digital Democracy & Participation research group of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and FZI. He is also a Visiting Research Collaborator at the Accelerator at Princeton University (School of Public and International Affairs).
His research combines Information Systems and Computational Social Science. It examines how platform mechanisms and generative AI shape democratic discourse and how more resilient information systems can be designed. His focus areas are societal polarization, information manipulation (disinformation, deepfakes), and digital participation. He combines Design Science Research with experimental, longitudinal, and computational approaches.
He currently leads SOSEC, a German-American longitudinal panel on societal and political sentiment; TACIT, together with Jacob Shapiro (Princeton), within the International Excellence in Research program of the Baden-Württemberg Stiftung; as well as kuKI and DisCoBoard, both funded by German federal ministries. He previously led TWON (European Commission), DeFaktS, and MuDDi.
He holds a PhD in Information Systems from KIT (with a research stay at the University of Southern California) and previously studied Political Science, Governance, and Public Policy in Berlin, Friedrichshafen, and Porto Alegre. Earlier, he worked at the Ernst Ludwig Ehrlich Scholarship Fund and in the German Bundestag.