Hussam Habib

Hussam Habib is a computational social scientist who left the University of Iowa to join the University of Graz's IDea_Lab (Interdisciplinary Digital Lab) as a postdoctoral researcher under Prof. Jana Lasser, part of the APART-USA programme of the Austrian Academy of Sciences created specifically for postdoctoral researchers leaving American institutions amid the uncertainty affecting US science funding.

Habib earned his BS in Computer Science from the National University of Computer & Emerging Sciences in Pakistan in 2018, then completed his PhD in Computer Science at the University of Iowa in 2025 under advisor Rishab Nithyanand, with a thesis examining how social media platforms influence user behavior.

His research spans computational social science, online user behavior, recommendation algorithms, algorithm auditing, online personalization, and natural language processing and statistical analysis, investigating how platform design and algorithmic systems shape the way people engage with information online.