Merriah Croston is a doctoral candidate in the Public Health Sciences program at Washington University in St. Louis, a Chancellor’s Graduate fellow and Spencer T. and Ann W. Olin fellow, and an inaugural recipient of the Center for Critical Internet Inquiry’s Tech Impact Network Dissertation Fellowship at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has theoretical and applied research interests in how and why health misinformation spreads on the internet and how to combat it. Her current projects use social network analysis and traditional statistics to evaluate fact-checking approaches and to explore the ways in which COVID-19 misinformation spreads on Twitter compared to other information types. Her dissertation research examines the prevalence and diffusion dynamics of popular COVID-19 misinformation narratives on Black Twitter and is the first in a series of projects that will investigate the health information ecosystem of online Black discursive networks.

Merriah has over 10 years of public health experience. Prior to pursuing a PhD, she held positions at the Georgia Department of Public Health, Northrop Grumman, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. She earned a Bachelor of Science from Georgetown University and a Master of Public Health in Epidemiology from Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health and is a former Gates Millennium Scholar. Complementary to her research interests, she is devoted to promoting gender and racial diversity in data science.