Judith Donath

Judith Donath
Judith Donath giving a talk at the EPFL, on June 22, 2009
Born (1962-05-07) May 7, 1962
NationalityAmerican
Alma materMIT
Yale University
Known forEducational software designer and builder, Social media research, Virtual world architect
Scientific career
FieldsMedia Arts, Human–computer interaction, History
InstitutionsMIT
ThesisInhabiting the virtual city: The design of social environments for electronic communities (1997)
Doctoral advisorAndrew B. Lippman
Doctoral students

Judith Stefania Donath (born May 7, 1962) is an American computer scientist who is a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center, and the founder of the Sociable Media Group at the MIT Media Lab. She has written papers on various aspects of the Internet and its social impact, such as Internet society and community, interfaces, virtual identity issues, and other forms of collaboration that have become manifest with the advent of connected computing.

Her research work includes issues centered on "identity and deception in online communities" and the creation of multiple virtual personae. In 1999 she researched the presence of deception in the online identities of Usenet users, as well as the reconstruction of the personality of an individual using data gathered from both online and offline encounters.