Professor Lilach Nir (Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania) holds a dual appointment as core faculty in the Department of Communication and Journalism and in the Department of Political Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. She specializes in public opinion, mass media effects, and comparative political communication. Her research efforts focus on the role communication plays in democracies: Does it contribute to pluralistic thinking or polarized hatred? Do social media narrow or widen knowledge gaps? Prof. Nir is a former Fulbright Fellow to the United States. She has served in the past on the International Communication Association (ICA’s) Executive Board and as Editor-in-Chief of Oxford’s International Journal of Public Opinion Research. She is currently a member of the research publications evaluation taskforce, appointed by the Planning and Budgeting Committee of the Council for Higher Education in Israel. Her publications include journal articles on public opinion perceptions, cross-national differences in news exposure and its effects, and the contribution of political disagreement to opinion quality. Her work has won a number of best paper awards and professional recognition, and appeared or is currently in press in PNAS: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Journal of Communication, American Political Science Review, Public Opinion Quarterly, Political Communication, and Communication Research.