Katrina Keegan is a Ph.D. student in political science specializing in comparative politics. Her research examines how authoritarian and hybrid regimes manage public opinion and political elites, with a regional focus on Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia. Her work draws on a range of methods, including machine learning and natural language processing (NLP), large language models (LLMs), statistical analysis, open-source research, and interviews.
Her research has been published in Democratization (“Corruption and Digital Authoritarianism: Political Drivers of E-Government Adoption in Central Asia,” 2024) and the HKS Misinformation Review (“Clarity for Friends, Confusion for Foes: Russian Vaccine Propaganda in Ukraine and Serbia,” 2022).
She earned her B.A. summa cum laude from the University of Chicago and her M.A. from Harvard University. Prior to joining Columbia, she served as a lead Russia subject matter expert at Two Six Technologies, where she developed scalable systems for analyzing Russian and Chinese propaganda and inauthentic influence campaigns. She speaks Russian and Ukrainian and has spent a combined two years living in Russia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, and Moldova.
