Photo from Claire’s appearance on TED Radio Hour by NPR.
Associate Professor Claire Wardle (Br’99) is a distinguished member of our Thouron Alumni community, carving out a unique path for herself with her own academic pursuits and achievements. Hailing from Northampton, U.K., Claire now lives in Ithaca, N.Y. The path she took to get from one to the other was not always easy and challenged her along the way.
After her studies at Hull University, where Claire majored in American Studies, she went on to apply for our Award. With a self-professed American politics obsession, Claire was eager to continue on the path she had set forth at Hull. “In so many ways, without the Thouron I wouldn’t have got the chance to do a PhD at the best Communication department in the world,” she shares. During her studies at the University of Pennsylvania in their Political Science Master’s degree programme, Claire also took courses in communication to better understand elections and persuasion. She would then go on to pursue her PhD at the Annenberg School of Communication, adding to her experience at Penn.
If she had not seen a small ad in The Guardian newspaper back in 1998 asking if anyone wanted to study in the States, who knows what different path Claire would have found herself on. “I’d just graduated with a BA in American Studies and desperately wanted to get back for a graduate degree but had no idea how I would afford it,” she explains.
A Career Dedicated to Fighting Misinformation
With her degrees from Hull and Penn under her belt, Claire began a career as a professor in 2004. Following her time at Penn, she returned to the U.K. to work as a professor at Cardiff University, where she worked for five years before heading down a different path. The opportunity to conduct research for the BBC came calling, which would present unexpected options to Claire shortly thereafter.
A formal offer from the BBC brought Claire to lead an organization-wide training course on how to verify content from social media. “From that, I started my own consultancy training newsrooms and UN agencies right around the world on user generated content, verification and misinformation,” she states. Unsurprisingly with her experience in digital information and audience behavior, Claire was called to the startup world soon after.
In 2012 she went on to work with Storyful, a startup based in Dublin, where she worked with a small team of journalists tasked with creating new methods for verifying content from social media. “In 2014, I moved to Geneva to work full time for UNHCR as their social media policy lead. Fifteen months later I moved back to the U.S. to work at Columbia University’s School of Journalism as the Research Director for the Tow Center for Digital Journalism,” she details.
From professor at Cardiff to research director for a top ivy league school in the U.S., Claire’s focus ebbed and flowed as her path continued to shift over the span of 10 years. It’s incredible the way that life can change for our Thouron Alumni in such a short amount of time! Of course, with the turning of tides in American politics in 2014, misinformation became a rampant occurrence in society. A year after joining Columbia University in her role, Claire left to co-found a non-profit, First Draft, as a response to the misinformation explosion coming on the heels of the 2016 U.S. elections.
Shifting Gears Back to Academia
For six years Claire ran First Draft, training thousands of journalists, policymakers and humanitarians around the globe on the challenges of navigating misinformation. During that time she also completed a research fellowship at Harvard University. “In 2021, I joined Brown University’s School of Public Health as a Professor of Practice because of my industry experience,” she shares. Within three years, Claire moved on to join Cornell University as an Associate Professor the summer of 2024 — a marked return to her academic roots in Communication. “I’ve had a very varied career. It’s been quite a career and one that I’m very proud of,” she posits.
While Claire has had many wonderful career achievements — such as coining the term “Information Disorder” which is used as a framework by policymakers and researchers globally, having The New York Times share her op-ed on deepfakes and then turn her into Adele to illustrate the power of deepfakes, and leading her own TED Talk — she truly is as wholesome as anyone else with a love for hiking with her dog, swimming the lake that she lives on in Ithaca, and relearning the clarinet!
By reconnecting with fellow Alumni, Dave Scales, while working as a consultant for the U.S. Surgeon General on the Health Misinformation Report in 2021, Claire has consistently been reminded of how impactful the Thouron Award can be for those in our Alumni community, as well as the global communities they will be called to serve. “The confidence that [my MA and PhD] degree gave me, the opportunities it presented, the network I built, and the friends I made set me up for an amazing life,” she shares.
Sharing Her Insights at the Thouron Alumni Symposium
At our next Annual Alumni Symposium, held in February 2026, Claire will be one of our fireside chat guest speakers — an honour we’re thrilled to bring to the the Thouron Alumni community. The future remains bright for upcoming Thouron Scholars, and Claire has hopes for how the Award continues to grow and evolve that echo sentiments of other Alumni. “The Award changed my life as I would never have had these opportunities otherwise. My parents were both social workers and did not have much experience of higher education so I’m passionate about supporting students who might not otherwise think they could apply for a scholarship like this,” she expresses.
What Could Your Future Look Like as a Thouron Scholar?
Learn more about the Thouron Award — one of the most prestigious and generous academic scholarships in the world, offering funding and cultural exchange between the University of Pennsylvania and U.K. institutions.
Applications for the Award are open from July to October for candidates from Penn and July to November for U.K. candidates.