Andrew Gruen is a researcher, consultant, reporter, sociologist, and software executive. He is currently a Manager of Strategic Initiatives for Facebook's Open Research and Transparency (FORT) team, an affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, and a Robert Bosch Foundation Global Governance Futures Fellow.
As a part of FORT team, he focuses on the governance of making private data resources availible to indepdendent academic researchers. Specifically, he supports work on studies that examine the impact of social media on democracy and elections in a way that preserves the privacy of individual users.
Previously, Andrew was a visiting research fellow at the Shorenstein Center at Harvard Kennedy School. He also served as Chief Communications Officer for Seven Bridges, a firm that develops tools to analyze genomic sequencing data at population scale. He led the company’s participation in the White House’s Cancer Moonshot program, with a particular focus on more creating more accurate, less invasive, genomics-based cancer diagnostics. As a Luce Scholar, Andrew worked in South Korea for the world’s largest citizen journalism organization, OhmyNews.
Andrew has also worked for and with many research universities and media companies, including the Northwestern University Media Management Center, the University of Southern California Norman Lear Center, the BBC, Hearst Television, CNET, and The Texas Tribune.
He holds a PhD (dissertation) and MPhil in sociology from the University of Cambridge, where he was a Gates Cambridge scholar, and a BSJ from The Medill School at Northwestern University.