Dr Casas is an Associate Professor of Politics, Technology, and Computational Social Science at the Department of Politics and International Relations and the Oxford Internet Institute, and a Governing Body Fellow at Reuben College. He is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow and Director of the Oxford Social Media Observatory. He received his PhD in Political Science from the University of Washington. Before joining Oxford, he held positions as Associate Professor at Royal Holloway University of London, Assistant Professor at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and Moore Sloan Research Fellow at the Center for Data Science and the Center for Social Media and Politics at New York University.
Dr Casas is a computational political scientist whose research examines how digital technologies and AI are reshaping politics, policy, and public discourse. His work spans three interconnected areas. In political communication and public policy, he studies the curation and moderation of political speech on social media platforms; the spread and effects of disinformation and information operations; the role of social media in shaping collective action and polarisation; and how social movements, interest groups, political parties, and the public use strategic communication to influence political agendas. In legislative politics, he investigates the conditions under which legislators and legislative groups shape policy through less visible mechanisms, such as amendments and legislative bundling. Across all his research, he develops and applies novel computational methods, including text and image analysis, large (vision) language models, and multimodal modelling approaches, to address both classical and emerging questions in political science. His work has been published in leading journals and outlets including Science Advances, American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Political Analysis, and Cambridge University Press. His research has received funding from NSF, NWO, ERC-Horizon, and UKRI, among other public and private organisations.
