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Ceren Budak, an affiliate of the University of Michigan Center for Political Studies, is among the 2026 class of Andrew Carnegie Fellows announced yesterday by the Carnegie Corporation of New York: 24 scholars will each receive a $200,000 research stipend to explore the causes of political polarization and identify possible solutions.

The class of 2026 marks the third cohort focused on developing a body of rigorous, evidence-based research about what can be done to strengthen the forces of cohesion in the United States, an overarching priority for the foundation’s grantmaking. Winning proposals look at topics such as the historical and religious roots of societal divisions in America, how digital communities shape the political identities of young men, and potential institutional reforms in campaign finance, the federal courts, and education, among other areas.

Ceren Budak is an associate professor of information and associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Michigan, where she also serves as associate director of the Center for Social Media Responsibility. A computational social scientist trained as a computer scientist, her research examines public discourse and collective behavior on digital platforms, with a particular focus on political polarization, misinformation, and collective action. Her work integrates large-scale field experiments, machine learning, and network science.

Budak’s project, “User Agency and the Trade-offs of Reducing Polarization Online,” builds on her research showing that algorithmic interventions on social media vary in their effectiveness across individuals and platforms and can involve meaningful trade-offs among desirable outcomes. Moving beyond these average effects, she will develop public-facing educational tools that allow people to explore how a given intervention might affect their feed, experiences, and attitudes — and then test whether giving users and communities meaningful agency over algorithmic choices, supported by these tools and participatory governance mechanisms, can yield better, more democratically legitimate outcomes.

Budak’s research has been published in leading journals and venues across general science, computer science, communication, and political science. She has led and contributed to major multi-institutional field experiments examining social media interventions at scale. She served on a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine committee on social media’s impact on youth well-being and was a 2023–24 faculty fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.

Carnegie has committed a total of $18 million to scholarly research focused on polarization, providing grants to 78 fellows since 2024. The funding allows scholars to take a sabbatical of up to two years and devote themselves to their work, making the Andrew Carnegie Fellows Program one of the most generous stipends of its type.

“Andrew Carnegie saw it as his mission to encourage, in the broadest and most liberal manner, investigations, research, and discovery, and the application of knowledge to the improvement of mankind,” said Dame Louise Richardson, president of Carnegie Corporation of New York and chair of the Andrew Carnegie Fellows jury. “Through support of our fellows, we are continuing that mission and seeking to harness the insights of scholars of all ages, stages, and disciplines to help us understand the nature of political polarization in the United States today and to devise a means of mitigating its impact on American society.”

The 2026 nomination cycle drew a record 381 submissions. The winners consist of 12 scholars from public universities, 11 from private universities, and one from a public university in Canada. Sixteen are tenured, eight are untenured, and they include 13 men and 11 women. The final selections were made by a distinguished panel of 11 jurors comprised of presidents, deans, and senior academics from some of the nation’s premier universities, research institutions, and think tanks.

In total, the fellows program has funded over 320 fellows, representing more than $60 million in grants. The anticipated result is generally a book or major study. Research by past fellows has led to Congressional testimony that addressed topics such as social media and privacy protections, transnational crime, governmental responses to pandemics, and college affordability. Fellows have received numerous honors through their research, including the Nobel Prize and National Book Award.