Laura Smith is a Professor of Psychology, Co-Director of the Bath Institute for Digital Security and Behaviour, and lead of the Digital Lives lab. She is a co-investigator of the Centre for Evidence and Research on Security Threats (CREST) https://crestresearch.ac.uk, and was joint Chief Editor of the British Journal of Social Psychology from 2020-2022. She received her PhD in Social Psychology from the University of Exeter in 2008, and has published widely over the past 15 years on the psychology underlying polarization, radicalization, social movements, and collective action. As a social and organizational psychologist, she has an established program of research examining how polarized groups emerge and evolve through intra- and intergroup interactions (both online and offline), and the implications of these processes for behavior. Prof Smith's research on polarization and radicalization has been funded by three major UK-based research councils and in 2016 she won a mid-career Fellowship from the British Academy to study the psychology of online radicalization.