Mark Hansen

Sen. Mark Hansen is a professor at Columbia Journalism School and founding director of the Brown Institute for Media Innovation. He has collaborated on numerous art installations that present complex data to the public. His work with Ben Rubin, Jer Thorp, and The Office for Creative Research has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, the London Science Museum, and the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain. Hansen’s journalism teaching and practice also center on data and computation. His 2017 course at Columbia contributed original reporting to The New York Times project The Follower Factory, which exposed the bot economy behind the sale of fake followers on Twitter—work recognized with a George Polk Award and a Pulitzer Prize finalist citation. In the last year, he has also collaborated on New York Times investigations into deficiencies in the U.S. organ transplant system. Hansen holds a PhD in Statistics from the University of California, Berkeley. He has published over 60 papers and holds eight patents in data science, statistics, and computer science.