About
I am a Ph.D. candidate (ABD) in the STEM-designated Communication program at the University of California, Santa Barbara, expected to graduate in June 2027 and on the academic job market for the 2026–2027 cycle. I am advised by Dr. Jiaying Liu in the Communication, Health, and Emerging Media (CHARM) Lab; my dissertation committee additionally includes Dr. Robin Nabi (UCSB) and Dr. Yingdan Lu (Northwestern).
I study how generative AI is reshaping persuasion — both how persuasive messages, campaigns, and tools get designed and who they manage to reach. My approach is computational at every level: I treat AI as three things at once — an object of study (AI-generated media as content), a methodological tool (LLM annotation and other multimodal computational methods as research instruments), and an intervention (AI-tailored messages and chatbots as persuasive tools).
My empirical work is anchored in health communication — especially anti-vaping and tobacco-related campaigns — but the theoretical questions and multimodal computational methods I develop travel readily to adjacent strategic communication contexts: political, corporate, and public-interest messaging. Methodologically, I specialize in multimodal computational analysis of communication content — including large language model annotation, natural language processing, computer vision, and interpretable machine learning — combined with experimental design and neurophysiological measures (fMRI, eye-tracking).
Selected Current Work
-
Diss.Multimodal Emotional Appeals in Anti-Vaping Videos on Social Media — A Computational Approach to Fear–Hope Flow and Message Effectiveness.
-
2026AwardGenerative AI for personalized — and equitable — health messaging.
-
2026Identifying the “recipe” of effective anti-vaping messages
-
2025/26Visual realism and misinformation potential of AI-generated images.
-
2026AwardLLM chatbots for vaping cessation.
→ See Research for the full research agenda, publications, and ongoing projects.
Affiliations & Background
Beyond UCSB, I collaborate with the Computational Multimodal Communication Lab (PIs: Prof. Cuihua Shen, Prof. Yilang Peng, Prof. Yingdan Lu) and the Computational Media and Politics Lab at Northwestern (PI: Prof. Yingdan Lu). I am also a trainee in the NIH/FDA CTP-funded Tobacco Regulatory Science Research Community. 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
-
Nov2026AwardTwo NCA 112th Top Student Paper Awards — solo-authored paper on a computational framework for emotion measurement (Comm & the Future Division), and co-first-authored paper on mixed emotion in online engagement (Comm & Social Cognition Division).
-
Aug2026FundingAwarded a Dissertation Fellowship (Fall 2026) from the Department of Communication, UCSB.
-
Aug2026AwardSelected for the AEJMC Mass Communication and Society Division Student Research Award.
-
Oct2026New preprint on medRxiv — Identifying message “recipes” for high perceived effectiveness (shared first author with Dr. Jiaying Liu).
-
Oct2026Poster at Text as Data (TADA) 2026, UC Berkeley — on measuring conversation-level language in an LLM health chatbot experiment.
-
Sep2026New solo-authored preprint on SocArXiv — Mapping the discourse network of cervical cancer screening on Reddit.
-
Jul2026Two presentations at the Summer 2026 NIH Tobacco Regulatory Science (TRS) Meeting, Bethesda, MD.
-
Jun2026Invited talk at the Affect, Ambivalence, and Adjustment Lab, Singapore University of Social Sciences.
-
Jun2026Four papers presented at the 76th ICA Annual Conference, Cape Town.
-
Jun2026FundingAwarded a Center for AI and Society Grant, UCSB — $8,000.
-
Jun2026AwardAwarded the Social Impact Award, Department of Communication, UCSB.
-
Apr2026Rathje et al. (Nature registered report on social media reduction) covered in The Washington Post.