Marc Ziegele has held the junior professorship for communication and media science with a focus on “online political communication” at HHU-Düsseldorf since February 2018. At the same time, he is head of the junior research group “Deliberative Discussions on the Social Web” funded by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia. Previously, he was a research assistant at the Institute for Journalism at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and studied media economics at the same institute. His research focuses on participation and discussions of citizens on the Internet. In the junior research group based at DIID, he is investigating measures to improve the quality and impact of users’ public discussions about political media topics – so-called online public-political connection communication.

It also researches the causes and consequences of media trust as well as various aspects of citizens’ social web use at the interface of communication science and psychology.