Announced in Autumn 2025, the FIA’s United Against Online Abuse in Sport Initiative signed a multi-year research collaboration with The University of Notre Dame and it’s Lucy Family Institute for Data & Society. Supported by the FIA Foundation, the collaboration will address the growing challenge of online abuse in sport including through surveys, global policy research and projects to help youth navigate online spaces safely.
Currently working on…
In Spring 2026, UAOA and Notre Dame launched a US-based College Student-Athlete Survey to assess the prevalence, nature and impact of online abuse across college sport. Further information on the survey can be found here.
Meet the Lucy Family Institute for Data & Society Team
Nitesh Chawla joined the University of Notre Dame faculty in 2007. He serves as the Lucy Family Director for Data & AI Academic Strategy, directing the University-wide Data, AI, and Computing Initiative as well as the Founding Director of the Lucy Family Institute for Data & Society. In addition to these roles, he is the Frank M. Freimann Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and the Director of the Data Inference Analysis and Learning Lab. Chawla is an expert in artificial intelligence, data science, and network science, and is motivated by the question of how technology can advance the common good through interdisciplinary research. As such, his research is not only at the frontier of fundamental methods and algorithms but is also making interdisciplinary and translational advances for societal impact.
Emma L. Briant, Ph.D. is Visiting Associate Professor at the Lucy Family Institute for Data and Society, at Notre Dame University. As a leading expert on propaganda, information warfare and new technologies her research and testimony have informed policymakers in the US and worldwide, government agencies, NGO’s, industry, and transnational organizations. Her research is best known for its role in revealing the Cambridge Analytica-Facebook scandal, including through the Oscar-shortlisted documentary ‘The Great Hack’. Dr. Briant has three books, Bad News for Refugees, Propaganda and Counter-Terrorism: Strategies for Global Change, and the Routledge Handbook on the Influence Industry.
Alex Thomas has served as the Strategic Program Manager for Notre Dame’s Data, AI, and Computing (DAC) Initiative since June 2025. He is a policy and research professional with experience in investigative analysis, open-source intelligence, and public sector operations. He most recently served as a Senior Open Source Research and Strategy Consultant at Booz Allen Hamilton, where he conducted strategic open source analysis for U.S. defense clients. Previously, Alex served as Assistant Secretary of the Idaho State Senate, where he managed the legislative lifecycle of Senate bills and advised on constitutional compliance across party lines. He also worked as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Kyrgyzstan, where he led district-wide English education initiatives, secured USAID grant funding for school infrastructure, and built sustainable community partnerships to expand youth programming and engagement. Alex holds a Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy from The Fletcher School at Tufts University with concentrations in International Security and Global Governance. A native to Boise, Idaho, he earned his bachelor’s degree in International Political Economy and Environmental Studies from The College of Idaho in 2017.
Jessica Young has worked as a Senior Data Scientist at the Applied Analytics and Emerging Technology Lab (AETL) at the University of Notre Dame since 2025. Prior to joining AETL, Young supported the Center for Social Science Research at the University of Notre Dame as a Data Scientist. She holds a MS in Applied Statistics from Rochester Institute of Technology. Her job is to assist faculty, staff, and students across all disciplines with their research from the project inception stage to analysis and dissemination. She has worked on a variety of projects across numerous disciplines including modeling perceptions of postpartum care, analyzing compliance in long term studies, detecting sleeping patterns using data from wearables, identifying profiles of student learners, text mining for economic words across thousands of novels, social network analysis of teachers and who they go to for support, crafting and editing R scripts for pulling and scoring survey data and multiple power analyses. She consults on projects at any stage cuah as the beginning formulation stage by running power analyses to the end stage by assisting with analysis write-ups and dissemination. While her main focus is on quantitative methodology such as regression models and text mining methods, she also has expertise in qualitative methods such as analyzing focus group feedback. She frequently teaches workshops available to all faculty, staff, and students. Past workshops include Intro to R, Intro to Stata, Intro to Tableau, Dealing with Imbalanced Data, Intro to Data Visualization in R, Machine Learning for Social Sciences, and Intro to Machine Learning.