Aleksandr Kogan

Kogan, a Cambidge University lecturer in the Department of Psychology, worked with Cambridge Analytica on building up the database of US voters then at the heart of the company’s plans, But while he was helping turn Facebook profiles into a political tool he was also an associate professor at St Petersburg State University, taking Russian government grants to fund other research into social media. Kogan appears to have largely kept the work private. Colleagues said they had not heard about the post in St Petersburg. Russia is not mentioned in a 10-page CV Kogan posted on a university website in 2015. A native Russian speaker, Kogan was born in Moldova and brought up in Moscow until he was seven, when his family emigrated to the US, where he later obtained citizenship. A profile on the Cambridge department of psychology’s website says Dr Kogan (who it seems was also briefly known as Dr Spectre) received his undergraduate training at the University of California, Berkeley, and completed his Ph.D. at the University of Hong Kong.