Eszter Hargittai is Professor and holds the Chair of Internet Use and Society at the Institute of Communication and Media Research of the University of Zurich. She is Fellow of the International Communication Association and an External Member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. She is past Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford and Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. She has also held visiting positions at Trinity College, Dublin (Ireland), the University of St. Gallen (Switzerland), University of Queensland (Australia), and the University of Vienna (Austria). Before moving to Zurich in 2016, she was the Delaney Family Professor in the Communication Studies Department at Northwestern University. She received a BA in Sociology from Smith College (1996) and a PhD in Sociology from Princeton University (2003).

Hargittai's research looks at how people may benefit from or be left behind as a result of their varied digital media uses with a particular focus on how differences in people's digital skills influence what they do online. She has looked at these questions in the domains of information seeking, health content (including Covid-19), political participation, job search, the sharing of creative content, and privacy management.

Eszter Hargittai's work has received awards from several professional associations including the International Communication Association's Outstanding Young Scholar Award. For her teaching, she received the Galbut Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award of the School of Communication at Northwestern University, which honors one faculty member each year for exemplary teaching and engagement with students both inside and outside of the classroom.

She has published over 110 journal articles, dozens of book chapters, one monograph, and has edited four books. In addition to having presented her work across the US, she has also given invited talks in 15 countries on four continents. She has keynoted 18 meetings, given over 160 invited talks, and has presented at numerous conferences.

Her work has been featured in many popular media outlets in the United States and internationally. Her research has been supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Microsoft Research, Nokia, Google, Facebook, and Merck, among others.

Hargittai is author of Connected in Isolation: Digital Privilege in Unsettled Times (The MIT Press, 2022) and co-author of the forthcoming book Wired Wisdom: Aging Better Online (with John Palfrey) to be published with the University of Chicago Press in summer 2025. Hargittai is editor of the Handbook of Digital Inequality (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2021), Research Exposed: How Empirical Social Science Gets Done in the Digital Age (Columbia University Press 2021), Digital Research Confidential (with Christian Sandvig, The MIT Press, 2015), and Research Confidential: Solutions to Problems Most Social Scientists Pretend They Never Have (University of Michigan Press, 2009). The latter three present a behind-the-scenes look at doing empirical social science research.

She has won some photo contests, has had her photography featured in books and calendars, and people she doesn't know have been willing to part with their money to own some of her paintings.