Lisa Reppell

Lisa Reppell is the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES) Senior Global Social Media and Disinformation Specialist. In this role, she serves as the focal point for research, program design, and technical assistance to country programs for IFES’s information integrity and counter-disinformation portfolio. She has engaged with election commissions, tribunals, courts, government interlocutors, and civil society in the provision of IFES’s technical assistance and research initiatives in more than 25 countries. Reppell also facilitates IFES’s relationships with private-sector technology companies and serves on the Board of the Observatory on Social Media of the Global Network for Electoral Justice.

She has authored several publications, including Election Management Body Approaches to Countering Disinformation and Legal and Regulatory Responses to Disinformation, part of the Consortium for Elections and Political Processes (CEPPS) CounteringDisinformation.org Guide. She has also authored Disinformation Campaigns and Hate Speech: Exploring the Relationship and Programming Interventions and COVID-19 Briefing Series: Preserving Electoral Integrity During an Infodemic.

Prior to joining IFES, Reppell was a grantee of the Open Society Foundations at the Institute for Security Studies in Pretoria, South Africa, and the lead author of Planning for Peace: Lessons from Mozambique’s peacebuilding process. She was a consultant researcher, social media strategist, and facilitator based in Istanbul, Turkey, from 2012 to 2016, where she maintained a diverse portfolio of projects on topics including democratic governance, political extremism, and women’s professional development.

Reppell has a Master’s Degree in Political Science from Sabanci University in Istanbul and a Bachelor’s Degree in comparative religion, fine arts, and gender studies from Washington and Lee University in the U.S.