Theo Araujo is Professor of Media, Organisations and Society as part of the Communication, Organizations and Society programme group at the Department of Communication Science. He is the principal investigator of cAlibrate, a project funded by the NWO Vidi program investigating use and trust calibration on Generative AI, of the Digital Data Donation Infrastructure (D3I), coordinating a consortium of six universities creating a national infrastructure for data donation, and of RIGHTS: Responsible Implementation of Gathering, Handling, and Treating Sensitive Individual Digital Traces. He is also a task lead and co-applicant at the large-scale research infrastructure project Macroscope, being one of the leads in the creation of the Netherlands Media Corpus Infrastructure, one of the co-directors of the Research Priority Areas Trust in the Digital Society and AI & Politics and a senior researcher at the Gravitation Program Public Values in the Algorithmic Society (AlgoSoc). He was the Scientific Director of the Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR) between 2022 and 2026, co-director of the Communication in the Digital Society initiative at the Department of Communication Science, and co-founder and co-director of the Digital Communication Methods Lab, part of the Research Priority Area Communication.
His chair investigates the dynamic interplay between media and organisations, and what it means for society, with a special focus on trust. Organisations are defined with a broad lens, encompassing not only companies or corporations, but also – and especially – non-governmental organisations, (semi-)public institutions, as well as social movements and other forms of organisations. His research focuses on the increasing adoption of artificial intelligence and related technologies within our communication environment play a role in this process. He is also interested in the latest developments of computational social science, and in the implementation of large-scale data collection and analysis for communication research.