Dhiraj Murthy a Professor of Journalism and Media Studies (in the Moody College of Communication), Sociology (by courtesy), and School of Information (by courtesy). He earned his Ph.D. in Sociology from University of Cambridge

His research explores social media, digital research methods, race/ethnicity, qualitative/mixed methods, big data quantitative analysis, community, and virtual organizations. Dr. Murthy has edited 3 journal special issues and authored over 80 articles, book chapters, and papers. Murthy wrote the first scholarly book about Twitter (second edition published by Polity Press, 2018). He has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Minority Health & Health Disparities, National Science Foundation, and by Good Systems at the University of Texas at Austin.

Murthy founded and directs the Computational Media Lab at UT Austin, a large lab with over 20 graduate and undergraduate students (and several high school interns). He is co-editor of the high impact journal Big Data & Society (IF=8.731). Dr. Murthy has chaired and co-chaired international social media conferences and serves on the advisory board of MediaWell, an initiative by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC).