Laura Kurek

About Me

I am a final-year Ph.D. candidate at the University of Michigan School of Information. I research how state actors attempt to manipulate information environments. My current work examines strategic attempts to influence large language models (LLMs) and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems with government-aligned narratives. I am advised by Dr. Ceren Budak and Dr. Eric Gilbert.

Prior to my Ph.D., I worked in industry for several years as a data science specialist at Accenture Federal Services. In 2017, I spent a year in the Ural Mountains on a Fulbright Scholarship.

Research interests: information integrity, social computing, computational social science

Education

• Ph.D. in Information, School of Information, University of Michigan, 2027 (expected)
• B.S. in Science, Technology, & International Affairs, Georgetown University

Updates

• Nov 2026: New preprint out: State Media at Retrieval Time: A Large-Scale Audit of Russian State-Aligned Sources in AI Chatbot Responses
• Sept 2026: Our paper Information Discernment in Large Language Models was accepted to NeurIPS ‘26
• May 2026: Awarded a Wikimedia Research Fund grant to study the impact of Ruwiki on Russian-language Wikipedia
• October 2025: At CSCW ‘25, I co-organized a workshop and presented a paper!

Publications

Other writings:

• Kurek, L., Harper, T., Bhatia, A., & Marechal, N. (2024). Rules of the Road: Political Advertising on Social Media in the 2024 U.S. Election. Center for Democracy & Technology.