Aleksandr Kogan ^People

Born in Moldova. Dr. Alex Kogan is an academic specializing in big data and positive psychology. He is perhaps best known as the scientist at the heart of the Cambridge Analytica controversy who collected the Facebook data and build the per- sonalitymodels that became a focus of international scrutiny in 2018. In his academic career, Alex has published extensively on the biology of kindness, big data approa- ches to understanding social connections, and the ingredients of a meaningful life. Kogandeveloped theapp,named 'ThisIsYourDigital Life, thatallowed Cambridge Analytica to collect personal details of 80 million Facebook users. He received his undergraduate degree at the University of California, Berkeley and a PhD from the University of Hong Kong. He served as an Assistant Professor at the University of Cambridge from 2012 to 2018, where he led the Cambridge Prosociality and Wel- being lab. Alex also has experience in entrepreneurship, starting several tech compa- nies. Alexandr Kogan has also had an affiliation with the University of Sankt Peters- burg in Russia, receiving funding for research on social media data mining and giving at least three lectures (in Russian) there since 2014. Kogan had a post-doctoral fellow- ship at the University of Toronto before moving to Cambridge.He has been a lecturer in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge since 2012, after which he became a Senior Research Associate until 2018.