About Me

I am an assistant professor of Data Science and director of the News Web and Social Media (NEWS) research lab at William & Mary (W&M). Before joining W&M, I was a postdoc at the Observatory on Social Media (OSoMe), Indiana University, Bloomington. And before that, a research assistant and member of the Web Science and Digital Libraries (WS-DL) Research Group at Old Dominion University (ODU). I’m a Computer Science graduate of ODU (PhD: 2020, MS: 2014) and Elizabeth City State University (BS: 2011).

My research interests include Social media/network analysis, computational social science, web/data science, web archiving, (local)news, and NLP.

Teaching (Fall 2026)

• DATA 101-01 - Reasoning with Generative AI: Tuesdays/Thursdays (8 -– 9:20am)

Bio

Dr. Alexander C. Nwala is an assistant professor of Data Science at William and Mary (W&M). Before joining W&M, he was a postdoc at the Observatory on Social Media, Indiana University, Bloomington. His research interests include developing algorithms and computational models for detecting social media manipulation and studying local and national news ecosystems. He received his PhD in Computer Science at Old Dominion University and has contributed multiple important tools and datasets to the data/web science, social media, (local) news, and web archiving communities. Dr. Nwala has taught Computer Science courses to High School, Undergraduate, and Graduate students and has collaborated across disciplines and institutions, including with computer scientists/journalists at IU, archivists at the National Library of Medicine, and lawyers at Harvard. His research has been published in multiple peer-reviewed Journals and Conferences including the ACM/IEEE JCDL, ACM HyperText, iPres, CIKM, and ICWSM. Moreover his research has been/is funded by the NSF, COVA CCI, and IMLS.