Cassandra Ellis

Profile

I am a second year part-time PhD student interested in the dissemination of nutrition information on social media.  I have a BSc in psychology, MSc in nutrition, and my full-time role at the Nutrition Society includes leading on the dissemination of nutritional science.  Using these skills and experience, I am interested in using transdisciplinary approaches to investigate the quality of nutrition information on Twitter.  

Research interests

My PhD project focuses on the quality of nutritional information on social media, in particular Twitter.  The sharing of misinformation and disinformation is also of interest. Misinformation research is uncovering how ‘fake news’ is created and disseminated, but what is less known is why users on social media make the decision to propagate fake content. As well as systematically examining the quality of information, this research will use corpus linguistics to examine social media users’ motivations for sharing fake news online to understand not just how, but why people consume and share news.

Qualifications

• BSc Psychology, University of London
• MSc Human Nutrition & Public Health, London Metropolitan University