Marius Gerads has been a research assistant at the Chair of Communication and Media Studies III of the Institute of Social Sciences at HHU-Düsseldorf since 2020. Previously, he worked as an online journalist for the magazine Wirtschaftswoche and still works for the multimedia editorial department of Deutschlandfunk. He studied Political Communication (M.A.) at the HHU-Düsseldorf and Social Sciences and Economics (B.Sc.) at the University of Cologne. Parallel to his bachelor studies, he completed the training of the Cologne School of Journalism for Politics and Economics. His research interests include public discourse and public opinion formation under conditions of online communication, dissonant public sphere and perception of media bias.

In the context of DIID, his interests include public opinion formation and the roles of established mass media (offline/online) and online-mediated interpersonal communication in this process.