Markus Hofer is Co-Director of Palumba EU's Knowledge Lab, a non-profit that builds gamified voting advice applications to engage young Europeans in democracy—reaching voters across 27 countries in 23 languages. He is also a PhD candidate at the Complexity Science Hub Vienna and Medical University of Vienna, where he researches how digital communication shapes political polarization. His recent work, published in PNAS, investigates the counterintuitive finding that increased social connectivity can amplify societal division. His work bridges civic technology with computational social science and network theory.