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 Deputy Director of the ESRC Network Plus for Analytical Behavioural Science for Security and Defence. She received her PhD in Social Psychology from the University of Exeter (2008), and held academic positions at the University of Queensland, Australia, from 2008-2011, before joining the Department of Psychology at the University of Bath in 2011. She was Chief Editor of the British Journal of Social Psychology from 2020-2022. Her research highlights how human psychology and behaviour interact with the affordances of digital technologies – and how this can produce opportunities, but also creates vulnerabilities and risks. She has published widely over the past 20 years on the psychology underlying polarization, radicalization, social movements, and collective action. As a social 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.