Welcome to my website! My name is Sebastian Sherrah, and I am a PhD student at the Computational Communication Science Lab within the University of Vienna.
My research explores how media exposure shapes political behaviour, particularly the conditions under which communication influences vote choice and electoral outcomes. I am interested in when and why these effects vary across individuals and contexts, and more broadly in how the media environments we inhabit shape the way we receive, process, and ultimately act on information. The medium, after all, is never neutral.
On the methodological side, my interests span computational approaches to communication research, including natural language processing and large language models, as well as quantitative methods working across individual-level survey data and aggregate electoral and polling figures. I am particularly drawn to comparative, cross-contextual designs that probe the boundary conditions under which effects hold, vary, or disappear. Sitting alongside this is a broader interest in emerging information environments, and a scepticism toward received wisdom about which of them best capture political reality.
When I have free time, I enjoy gambling for chairs.
If any of these things interest you, or you have something that might interest me (such as chairs) please feel free to get in touch. The medium is up to you!