Rachel Gibson is a Professor of Politics at the University of Manchester, having joined the Department and Politics and Institute for Social Change December 2007. Between 2016 -2019 she served as Director of the Cathie Marsh Institute for Social Research. She is currently running a 5 year international project ‘Digital Campaigning and Electoral Democracy’ (DiCED) that is funded by the European Research Council as an Advanced Investigator Grant. Previous appointments include Professor of New Media Studies at the University of Leicester and Lecturer in politics at the University of Salford. She completed her PhD thesis on the rise of anti-immigrant parties in Western Europe in the late 20th century at Texas A&M University in the US. She has held visiting fellowships at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES), the Australian National University (ANU), and the Autonomous University in Barcelona (AUB). Rachel has led several projects examining the impact of the Internet on political parties, campaigns and voters funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the Australian Research Council (ARC). She has been a PI/Co-I on the Australian Election Study since 2001 and the Australian Candidate Study. She was co-editor of the Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties (2011-16) and is a current Editorial Board member of generalist and specialist journals in the field including Political Studies, the Journal of Information Technology and Politics.  She is a member of the Peer Review College of the ESRC and regularly reviews for the leading journals in the field and major national and international funding bodies.