Univ.-Prof. Dr. Desirée Schmuck

Professor of Media Change and Media Innovation 

Vice-Director of Studies

Master Program Communication Science (SPL 22)

Research Interests

• Digital media use of children and adolescents
• Political engagement in digital environments
• Media change and social relations
• Media innovation and autonomy

Desirée Schmuck (PhD, University of Vienna) is Professor of Communication Science with a special focus on Media Change and Media Innovation in the Department of Communication of the University of Vienna. Further, she is affiliated with the Media Psychology Lab of the Department of Communication Science at KU Leuven, Belgium. After completing her PhD at the University of Vienna, Desirée Schmuck was a postdoctoral researcher at the LMU Munich in Germany and Assistant Professor (tenure track) for digital media effects at KU Leuven, Belgium. 

Her research focuses on changes in the media environment due to the presence of digital technologies and artificial intelligence (AI) and their consequences for media users. Her work has been published in various leading journals in the field of Communication Science and related disciplines, such as the Journal of Communication, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, New Media & Society, Political Communication, and Communication Research. She received awards by the International Communication Association (ICA), the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC), as well as the German Communication Association (DGPuK). In 2018, her dissertation was honored with the University of Vienna's and City of Vienna's Doc.Award.

She currently supervises a team of three PhD researchers at the Department of Communication of the University of Vienna and two joint PhD students and one post-doctoral researcher at the Media Psychology Lab at KU Leuven. 

She is also PI of the research project InformMe! (funded by the Belgian Research Fund FWO), which deals with political socialization of adolescents through social media influencers. Desirée is also one of the leading researchers of the collaborative project POLKNOW (€ 1.800.000) that investigates the consequences of selective, missing and false political information in adolescence and young adulthood by building a large-scale youth panel YouVoice. Furthermore, she is part of the editorial board of the journals Information Communication & Society, Media Psychology, Mass Communication & Society, and the Journal of Media Psychology. Since 2022, she is included in Stanford University's list of "World's Top 2%" scientists.