Dr Basavaraj is Research Fellow in Social Cognition and Digital Media at University College London, working on the DigiPatch project. Previously, he was a Fellow in Computational Social Science at the Digital Speech Lab, where he remains a Research Associate.

His work deploys cross-disciplinary methodological approaches to address topics in political science. His substantive and methodological research interests encompass social media, misinformation, polarization, public opinion, political communication (especially campaigning and advertising), natural language processing, machine learning, and experiments. He is particularly interested in developing novel approaches to linking social media data with surveys. He works with other Lab members to trace the implications of empirical research for platform policies, with especial attention to the issue of fact-checking. 

Dr Basavaraj has served as a Junior Fellow for the Electoral Integrity Project (EIP) in 2022, conducting experiments to investigate the relationship between misinformation and electoral integrity. He has served as a co-investigator on various projects, including the India Elections Study (IES) and the Meta (Facebook) Data Grant. Previously, he has worked on UKRI-funded projects studying both traditional and social media, and the 2019 UK General Election. His work has appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as Political Psychology and the Journal of Quantitative Description, and his research has been presented at many conferences including APSA, MPSA, PSA, WAPOR, WAPOR Asia, IJPP, and IEEE.

He received his PhD and MRes in Advanced Quantitative Methods from the University of Exeter, where he was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). He also holds a Master of Public Policy from the National Law School of India University, and a Bachelor of Engineering from Visvesvaraya Technological University. A trained engineer, he initially worked in the software industry before joining academia.