Helen Margetts OBE FBA is Professor of Society and the Internet in the Oxford Internet Institute, a multi-disciplinary department of the University of Oxford. She is Senior Advisor and Visiting Professor at LSE’s Data Science Institute. From 2018 to 2025, she founded and directed the Public Policy Programme at the Alan Turing Institute for Data Science and AI, which gained national and international recognition for its pioneering work on AI and government.

She has researched and written extensively about the relationship between technology, politics, public policy and government including over 150 articles and six books on the topic, including Digital Era Governance (OUP, 2008), Data Science, AI and the Third Wave of Digital Governance (OUP, forthcoming) and Political Turbulence: How Social Media Shape Collective Action (Princeton University Press) which won the Political Studies Association’s W.J.Mackenzie prize for best politics book in 2017.

Public service appointments include the Smart Data Council (from 2025), the Home Office Scientific Advisory Council (HOSAC, from 2019) and the United Nation Committee of Experts on Public Administration (UN CEPA, from 2025).