Comfort Umoren-Olorunnisomo

Comfort is a doctoral student at the School of Communication and Information, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Her research sits at the intersection of social media, information quality, and social change in the Global South. She is interested in the feedback loop between screens and real life and how people use social media to participate in and make sense of events around them. She adopts both qualitative and quantitative methods in her work, including interviews, focused group discussions, surveys, and content analysis.

She is an alumna of the Atlas Corps fellowship program in Washington, DC, where she served as a global communications fellow at Deseret Management Corporation. Prior to this, she had worked as the COO at the Knowledge, Skills, and Entrepreneurship (KSE) Network; as a media relations officer at Alpha Reach; and as a reporter at This Day newspaper in Nigeria. Comfort is passionate about leadership and youth empowerment and has led several teams in program development and projects, including the World Bank Digital Skills program in Nigeria and the #MTNBlowMyHustle campaign training, among others.

She is currently the president of the Doctoral Students Association at the School of Communication and Information and a former Dean's Fellowship awardee at Rutgers.

Comfort holds a master’s (distinction) and bachelor’s (first class) degrees in communication and language arts, both from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, and a national diploma (distinction) in mass communication from the Lagos State University of Science and Technology (formerly Lagos State Polytechnic).