Michael Zimmer, PhD, is a privacy, data, and AI ethics scholar, Professor & Vice-Chair in the Department of Computer Science at Marquette University, and Director of its Center for Data, Ethics, and Society. Recognized globally as an expert in data, AI, and internet research ethics, his scholarship and insights are used by researchers, ethics bodies, and government & industry partners worldwide, and he serves on multiple ethics committees and advisory boards.
Dr. Zimmer’s interdisciplinary research explores the social and ethical implications of digital technologies and platforms, with a particular focus on internet research ethics, pervasive data practices, and the ethical challenges of big data and artificial intelligence. As a founding member of the PERVADE (Pervasive Data Ethics for Computational Research) project, Zimmer investigates how researchers, platforms, regulators, and user communities confront the complex ethical challenges posed by computational research using large-scale, pervasive datasets about people. Other recent projects have explored the privacy and ethical risks posed by emerging technologies, including wearable fitness trackers, smart-home devices, autonomous vehicles, femtech applications, and predictive algorithms.
Zimmer also curates The Zuckerberg Files, a digital archive of all public utterances of Facebook’s founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, and he was an advisor to Gizmodo on the responsible release of The Facebook Papers. He recently appeared in the “Facebook Gets a Facelift” episode of Vox’s “Land of the Giants” podcast series on Meta/Facebook, and was featured in the Sky documentary film “Zuckerberg: King of the Metaverse.”
Dr. Zimmer currently co-chairs the AoIR Ethics Working Group, serves on the ACM SIGCHI Research Ethics Committee, and routinely provides data ethics expertise to a range of academic and professional communities. From 2021-2024, he served as ethics advisor for the European Commission-sponsored SPATIAL Project (Security and Privacy Accountable Technology Innovations, Algorithms, and Machine Learning). In 2025, he was appointed to the Computing Research Association’s Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council, where he contributes to shaping the future of computing research in the public interest. Zimmer is also a member of the ACM Committee on Professional Ethics (COPE).
Dr. Zimmer’s work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Association for the Advancement of Science, the Northwestern Mutual Data Science Institute, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and other sources.
Zimmer regularly engages with advocacy, government, and industry groups on matters of data ethics and research oversight, including the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine’s Committee on Science, Technology, and Law, the Office of Human Research Protection within the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, the Secretary’s Advisory Committee on Human Research Protections (SACHRP), and the Presidential Summit of the National Association of Attorneys General. He is frequently invited to speak with Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) and other regulatory bodies on the ethical challenges posed by big data, algorithmic research, and emerging technologies.
As co-editor of The Information Society book series for MIT Press, Zimmer has overseen the publication of numerous academic titles by leading global scholars. He also sits on the editorial boards for the ACM Journal of Responsible Computing, the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, the IEEE Transactions on Technology and Society, and the Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society.
Zimmer has written for Wired, The Washington Post, and The Huffington Post, and has been a guest on National Public Radio‘s All Things Considered, Morning Edition, Science Friday, and Here & Now news programs. Zimmer has appeared in news articles for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and regularly appears in various other national and local media outlets.
Zimmer received his PhD in Media, Culture, and Communication from New York University in 2007 and was the Microsoft Resident Fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School from 2007-2008. Prior to joining Marquette in 2019, he spent over a decade at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee in the School of Information Studies.
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