The Center for Advanced Internet Studies (CAIS) is pleased to announce the new head of the “Research Data & Methods” team: Prof. Dr. Johannes Breuer will take over leadership of the team as of September 1, 2025. He was jointly appointed as Professor by CAIS and the University of Duisburg-Essen.
The “Research Data & Methods” team at CAIS positions itself at the intersection of methodological innovation, substantive research, and practice-oriented support for researchers. In addition to carrying out its own research projects, the team develops concepts and materials in the field of data and methods and supports researchers throughout the entire research process. In this way, it actively contributes to scientific excellence and to the interdisciplinary digitalization research at CAIS.
The appointment of Johannes Breuer was made in the context of a competitive selection process in cooperation with the University of Duisburg-Essen. In a multi-stage evaluation process, he prevailed against a strong field of applicants. The new position is also tied to the establishment of a professorship in “Digital Social Sciences” at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Duisburg-Essen.
Before joining CAIS, Johannes Breuer spent eight years at GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, most recently as Senior Researcher and Head of the “Digital Society Observatory” team in the Department of Computational Social Science. From 2021 to 2024, he and Prof. Katrin Weller (GESIS and Heinrich Heine University) established the “Research Data & Methods” team at CAIS. Over the course of his academic career, Johannes Breuer has worked at the University of Cologne, University of Hohenheim, University of Münster, and the Leibniz Institute for Knowledge Media (IWM) in Tübingen.
His main research interests include the use and effects of digital media, digital trace data, computational methods, and meta-science (in particular questions of reproducibility and replicability of research). He brings extensive methodological expertise, especially with regard to new data types in digitalization research and open science.
Find the German press release here
About the Center for Advanced Internet Studies (CAIS)
Since April 2021, the state of North Rhine-Westphalia has been providing long-term funding for the Center for Advanced Internet Studies (CAIS) in Bochum as a central institute for digitalization research. Through evidence-based solution proposals, CAIS contributes to shaping digital transformation in the interest of society. CAIS was founded as an institute for advanced study in early 2017 and has since awarded fellowships to national and international guest researchers in the field of digitalization research. In three research programs – on the topics of digital democratic innovations, educational technologies, and artificial intelligence and the design of trustworthy AI – as well as in the research focus on social cohesion in digital media environments, interdisciplinary teams investigate the challenges of digital transformation. At CAIS, disciplines ranging from the social sciences and humanities to computer science are interlinked, and research findings are tested in practice.