Assistant Professor Maria Rodriguez named to Twitter's inaugural Academic Research Advisory Board

Congratulations to Assistant Professor Maria Rodriguez on being named to Twitter's inaugural Academic Research Advisory Board. The board was designed to create regular and frequent dialogue between members of the academic community and the Developer Platform. The board is composed of prominent members of the academic community who volunteered to offer their expertise to impact the ways Twitter supports and builds products or programs for research with the Twitter API. 

In reaction to this news Rodriguez says, “It’s a privilege to help represent applied social science on the Twitter academic research advisory board. Though social media data is representative of a cross section of society, it has important insights for social work scholars and practitioners, especially for those populations not engaged in typical social services. I hope more social work scholars will see Twitter data as meaningful to their work, and be encouraged to explore how it might help the development and implementation of their interventions”. 

What the Academic Research advisory board will do

The advisory board model was designed to play a defining role in how Twitter, and the Developer Platform specifically, invests in supporting the academic community. They have been invited to a variety of internal meetings, given opportunities to review the Twitter Developer Platform’s proprietary projects in planning phases, and introduced to product alphas/betas that can benefit researchers. In the near future they’ll also contribute to internal workshops with the Developer Platform, sharing critical external expertise that will better inform what, and how, our teams build.

For the first-year pilot of this program, the Academic Research advisory board will focus on:

• Advising on the benefits, concerns, or risks around new product and program developments for academic research with public data from Twitter
• Advising how Twitter can increase the diversity and number of researchers who can leverage public Twitter data in their studies
• Advising on opportunities to share more knowledge across different disciplines and to amplify academic research work

To begin, this inaugural board is based out of the United States, and was built to represent a range of academic disciplines and expertise, tenure, backgrounds, and locations. This program must continue to intentionally seek out diverse, inclusive perspectives, so this board will also help decide how the board nomination and selection process might work moving forward. As a next step, we hope to open this program to more  researchers around the world who can represent more global points of view.