Olessia Koltsova is the director of the Laboratory for Social and Cognitive Informatics (formerly – Laboratory for Internet Studies) at HSE University, St.Petersburg.

She is also an active member of International Communication Association where she participates in the Membership and Internalization Committee and a member of several journal editorial boards, including Information Processing and Management and Computational Communication Research.

Olessia holds a PhD in sociology and a higher education diploma in journalism and identifies herself as a social scientist committed to interdisciplinary research in the sphere of computational communication science. She leads various collective projects in the sphere of internet and society, as well as in methods of large-scale automatic internet data analysis for social science.

In recent years, she has published on fake news perception, cognitive and psychological limits to online communication, ethnicity-targeted speech detection, user content topical composition and sentiment, online community structure, and other topics. She is also the author of News Media and Power in Russia, Routledge, 2006.