People
Faculty
Shuning Lu, Ph.D.
Shuning Lu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication, North Dakota State University. Her research interests revolve around news use and effects, political communication, and digital journalism. Her recent projects explore social media news engagement, online incivility, and civic engagement with both observational and experimental data.
Zoltan P. Majdik, Ph.D.
Zoltan P. Majdik is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication, North Dakota State University. His research interest lies in the field of rhetoric, with a focus on computational approaches to rhetorical texts. His recent projects explore how complex matters such as climate change are framed in policy discourse, and on how to build machine learning models for classifying complex rhetorical language-structures.Speakers
Kaiping Chen, Ph.D.
Kaiping Chen is an Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Department of Life Sciences Communication. She employs data science and machine learning methods as well as interviews to examine how digital media and technologies affect politicians’ accountability to public well-being and how deliberative designs can improve the quality of public discourse on controversial and emerging technologies and mitigate the spread of misinformation. Her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation and appeared in flagship journals across disciplines. As a civic engagement practitioner, Kaiping also helps local governments in US and China implement and analyze innovative practices of engaging citizens throughout policymaking.
S. Scott Graham, Ph.D.
S. Scott Graham uses computational methods to study communication in bioscience and health policy at The University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of The Politics of Pain Medicine (The University of Chicago Press, 2015), Where’s the Rhetoric? (Ohio State University, 2020) and The Doctor and the Algorithm (Oxford University Press, 2022). His research is also published in a variety of journals including, Rhetoric of Health & Medicine, Plos-One, and the Annals of Internal Medicine. His findings have been covered in The New York Times, US News & World Report, Science, and AI in Health.
Saif Shahin, Ph.D.
Saif Shahin is an Assistant Professor of Digital Culture at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. His scholarship looks at data and technology as sociocultural phenomena, power in digital social networks, and the politics of online identity construction. He regularly employs computational methods in his research, including natural language processing, topic modeling, sentiment analysis, and network analysis — often in conjunction with qualitative techniques. His award-winning research has been featured in flagship journals in communication, sociology, and systems science. He also serves as Associate Editor of the Journal of Information Technology & Politics.
Tian Yang, Ph.D.
Tian Yang just received his Ph.D. from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and will join Chinese University of Hong Kong as an Assistant Professor in Communication this fall. He is interested in applying methods in computational social science to study political communication across the globe, especially in China and the US. Particularly, he looks at how today’s high-choice media environment influences the public’s information behaviors. His research employs various approaches, including network analysis, online experiments, natural experiments, etc.
Dan Pemstein, Ph.D.
Dan Pemstein is a Professor of Political Science & Public Policy at North Dakota State University. He is a comparative political economist and methodologist who studies challenges that digital networks pose to democracy and develops tools to better measure qualities of democratic institutions. He is co-director of the Digital Society Project, co-developer of the Unified Democracy Scores, co-author of the Scythe Statistical Library, and serves as project manager for measurement methods, and steering committee member, for the Varieties of Democracy project.
Dane Mataic, Ph.D.
Dane Mataic’s research explores the intersection of mobilization, international conflict, and social inequalities. Broadly, he applies organizational and community theories to address topics as wide ranging as the spread of governmental policies that regulate religious organizations, the mobilization of religious members by American churches, and the spread of religious bias and advocacy.Teaching Assistants
Participants
Maral Abdollahi
Maral Abdollahi is a doctoral candidate at the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota. She has a master's degree from the University of Vienna. Maral studies consumers' perceptions and responses regarding virtual influencers. She is passionate about advertising, emerging technologies, and consumer psychology.
Sara Bano, Ph.D.
Sara Bano is an assistant professor in the School of Education North Dakota State University. Her research interests focus on international and comparative higher education, adult learning, and transformative learning in global context. Her recent projects are examining transformative learning for nursing faculty in online educational environments. She hopes her research will positively impact adult learners’ experiences in diverse educational contexts.
Jamie M. Chen, Ph.D.
Jamie M. Chen is from Department of Management and Marketing at North Dakota State University’s College of Business. With a Ph.D. degree in regional economics, Jamie has built an expertise in service management and digital marketing innovations. Her future research would focus on social media data mining (e.g., content analysis) to develop new business models.
Emmanuel M. Dadzie
Emmanuel Mylo Dadzie is a Ph.D. student in Communication at North Dakota State University.He aims at contributing to the realignment of democratic institutions in democracies indeveloping countries by researching the interaction of the communication of political actors,social psychology, and public policy. UNESCO WPF content development team member.
Jesse DeDeyne
Jesse DeDeyne is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology at Baylor University in Waco, TX. His research interests include: religion (in particular Evangelical Protestants, and politically liberal Evangelical Protestants), politics (in particular split-ticket voting and disparate identities), and stratification at all levels.
Yuming Fang
Yuming Fang is a third-year PhD student in the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota. Her research interests are in health communication, specifically examining how individuals respond to health misinformation and misinformation correction interventions.
Emily Galbraith
Emily Galbraith is a second-year master's student in Sociology at North Dakota State University. Her research interests lie global development, human rights, and political change. She also aims to make data accessible, and foster ethical, meaningful engagement with social data.
Tzu-Hsin Huang
Tzu-Hsin Huang is a doctoral student at Brown School, Washington University in St. Louis. Her research focuses on child maltreatment prevention and intervention. She had over a decade of practice experience in child protection services and policy implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC).
Prasanna Humagain, Ph.D.
Prasanna Humagain is a postdoc research specialist at the Upper Great Plain Transportation Institute, NDSU. His research spans the areas of travel demand modeling, travel behavior, transportation planning, and tourists' behavior. He is also interested in understanding tourists' perceptions and informing planning & policy measures for sustainable development, as well as designing policies conducive to the physical and mental well-being of commuters.
Lei Jiang, Ph.D.
Lei Jiang is an assistant professor in the School of Education at North Dakota State University. His research interests focus on TESOL and bilingual education, educational leadership, and teacher education. His recent projects analyze both national large-scale data sets and ethnographic data to explore transnational students’ educational experiences, high school-to-college transition, and culturally sustaining school leadership.
Chetna Kuanr
Chetna Kuanr is a first year PhD student at Northeastern University's Department of Sociology. Substantively, her research focuses on examining the relationship between spatial and social boundaries to understand populism and social movements with a regional focus on South Asia. More broadly, she is interested in theories of urban sociology focused on the Global South and combining computational methods and machine learning with qualitative methods.
Wenhao Li
Wenhao Li is an undergraduate senior at the University of Minnesota and an incoming graduate student of University of Chicago's computational social science master's program this fall. His research interests are the application of biostatistical methods to economics and the Developmental Dictatorship.
Xinyue (Gordon) Liu
Xinyue Liu is a Ph.D. student at North Dakota State University's Department of Communication. His research interests lie at the intersection of media effects and emerging media technologies, with a focus on how media platforms (both entertainment and instructional) can influence and facilitate users' psychological processing.
Loi A. Nguyen, Ph.D.
Loi A. Nguyen is an Assistant professor at Metropolitan State University. She holds a Ph.D. in Human Resource Development with a minor in Business Administration from University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Her research has been published in books, and journals such as Management Learning, Journal of Economics and Development, Journal of Organisational Studies and Innovation.
Mir Rabby
Mir Rabby is a master’s student in the Department of Communication at North Dakota State University. His research interest lies in organizational and small group communication, such as anonymity, social influence, and group processes. He aims to employ computational methods (e.g., text mining) for analysis of interactional data.
Sarah Thorngate
Sarah Thorngate is a librarian at Northwestern University and a Ph.D. student in sociology at Loyola University Chicago. Her research interests lie in social class inequalities in higher education, and in how race, class, and gender shape information seeking and information marginalization in maternal health and mothering.
Michael Vosburg
Michael Vosburg is a PhD student at North Dakota State University's Department of Communication. He has taught and practiced photojournalism in four states for more than 30 years. His research interest lies in visual communication. He hopes to develop concepts and theory about effects of visual communication.
Kurt Williams
Kurt Williams is a STEM education researcher interested in improving educational equity by leveraging data for evidence-based policymaking. Kurt is now a PhD candidate in STEM Education at North Dakota State University and formerly an intern in the U.S. Department of Education Office of the Chief Data Officer.
Shuxi Wu
Shuxi Wu is an M.A. student in the Asian Studies Program at the University of Oregon. Her disciplinary fields are anthropology and media studies, and her research interests are digital infrastructures in East Asia.