Helen Margetts is Programme Director for Public Policy at The Alan Turing Institute, Professor of Society and the Internet at the University of Oxford and Professorial Fellow at Mansfield College. From 2011-2018, she was Director of the Oxford Internet Institute, a multi-disciplinary department of the University of Oxford dedicated to understanding the relationship between the Internet and society, before which she was UCL’s first professor of Political Science and Director of the School of Public Policy (1999-2004).

She has an undergraduate degree in Mathematics, and worked as a computer programmer before studying political science at LSE (MSc 1990, PhD 1996). She has researched and written extensively about technology, politics, public policy and government, including books Political Turbulence (2016), Paradoxes of Modernization (2010) and Digital Era Governance (2006) Helen sits on the UK government’s Digital Economy Council, the Home Office Scientific Advisory Council and the Ada Lovelace Institute. She was founding Editor of the journal Policy and Internet (Wiley).

She has been awarded the Political Studies Association’s 2017 prize for best politics book, the 2018 Friedrich Schiedel Prize for research leadership by the Technical University of Munich; the 2020 Meyer Struckmann prize by the Heinrich Heine University of Dusseldorf for ‘Digitization & Democracy’ research and the 2019 John F Kluge Senior Chair in Technology and Society at the Library of Congress.

In 2019 she was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy and received an OBE in the New Year’s Honours List for services to social and political science.