Philipp Lorenz-Spreen's research focuses is on self-organized online discourse and how to empower democratic and autonomous decision-making through platform design and boosting. His aim is to better understand the interplay between human behaviour and the connectivity and functioning of online platforms, in particular how this affects the public discourse and thus our democracy. But also to question the status quo and explore how this technology offers untapped opportunities for an improved information ecosystem and participatory democracy lived online. Recently, he has become interested in how the research community can foster the paradigm shift in data access for the common good. He received his PhD from the TU Berlin on empirical methods and theoretical models to describe the dynamics of collective attention. At the LMU in Munich he studied physics with a focus on systems biophysics. In 2021, he received the Prize for Young Scientists from the Leopoldina.