About

I am a Ph.D. candidate in the STEM-designated Communication program at the University of California, Santa Barbara, expected to graduate in June 2027. I am advised by Dr. Jiaying Liu in the Communication, Health, and Emerging Media (CHARM) Lab.

My research sits at the intersection of persuasion, health communication, and computational social science. I study how emotional appeals, multimodal message features, and online social interactions shape audience perceptions, psychological reactance, and behavioral intentions — with applications to anti-vaping public service announcements, cancer prevention messaging, and digital media well-being.

Methodologically, I draw on experimental design, neurophysiological measures (fMRI, eye-tracking), large-scale social media analysis, natural language processing, and computer vision. My dissertation committee additionally includes Dr. Robin Nabi (UCSB) and Dr. Yingdan Lu (Northwestern).

Beyond UCSB, I collaborate with the Computational Multimodal Communication Lab (PIs: Prof. Cuihua Shen, Dr. Yilang Peng, Dr. Yingdan Lu) and the Computational Media and Politics Lab at Northwestern (PI: Dr. Yingdan Lu) on projects related to AI-generated images and multimodal communication. Before academia, I led brand and marketing at a Beijing-based financial-IT firm and earned my M.A. from USC Annenberg.

Research Interests

Recent

• Jun2026
  Four papers presented at the 76th ICA Annual Conference, Cape Town.
• May2026
  Awarded the Social Impact Award, Department of Communication, UCSB.
• Apr2026
  CHARM Lab research covered in The Washington Post.

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