Ewan Thomas-Colquhoun

Areas of Research

  • Comparative Politics

  • Digital Governance & Digital Authoritarianism

  • Policy Transfer

  • Eastern Europe & Central Asia

  • Computational Social Science

Methods

  • Natural language processing

  • Machine learning

  • Quantitative methods 

  • Qualitative analysis

Biography 

Ewan Thomas-Colquhoun is a PhD student and researcher within the Digital Governance, Technology and Policy chair at the Hasso Plattner Institute. His research project concerns Russian influence in digital policy trends across post-Soviet Eurasia, applying computational and machine learning approaches to describe convergent approaches to digital governance.   

Alongside this project, Ewan also supports the research of the ‘The Path to Power’ Project led by Prof. Gillian Bolsover within the HPI’s Digital Governance, Technology and Policy Chair. His interest in questions of political power, international influence, and digital technology developed through previous work as a researcher in the DGO funded SCRIPTS cluster project: “War in Ukraine, Russia’s potential decoupling from the global internet and the changing perspective of emerging powers on internet and data governance” at the Freie Universität in Berlin.  

Projects

  • Path to Power 2024: Research on the EU Election in Germany 2024 and the Georgian Parliamentary Election. 2024

Education

  • Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam, Potsdam. Doctor of Philosophy. (PhD) (expected 2027)

  • Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin. Master of the Arts (M.A.) – East European Studies. 2021 – 2024 

  • University of Bristol. Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) – German and Russian. 2016 – 2020 

Experience 

  • Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Research Assistant. Apr 2022 – March 2024  

  • Third Bridge Group Ltd., London, Associate – European Consulting.  Feb 2021 – Jul 2021   

  • TransPerfect, Prague, German Language Data Analyst. Jun 2020 – Dec 2020  

  • University of Bristol, Bristol, Research Intern.  May 2018 – Aug 2018

Conferences 

  • The GOR 26 Annual Conference (organized by the German Society for Online Research), Cologne, Germany — 2026

  • The Weizenbaum Conference on Democracy and Well-Being in Digital Societies, Berlin, Germany — 2025