I am an Assistant professor in the Department of Communication at North Dakota State University. My research lies in the intersection of journalism studies and political communication. Most of my work examines how news audiences engage with news content, news workers, other audience members, and news algorithms in the digital media environment. I primarily use quantitative methods, such as web-based experiments and large-scale surveys, as well as computational social sciences methods to answer my research questions. I also actively collaborate with colleagues from different subfields of communication and beyond to develop innovative approaches to studying communication phenomena. 

My work has appeared in peer-reviewed journals, including Communication Research, New Media & Society, and Digital Journalism, among others. I have received Top Paper Awards from major academic associations, such as International Communication Association (2018, 2020, 2023), Association for Education in Journalism & Mass Communication (2019, 2023, 2024) and National Communication Association (2016). My research has gained support from The Arthur W. Page Center at Pennsylvania State University, Mass Communication & Society Division of Association for Education in Journalism & Mass Communication, Qualtrics Inc., and North Dakota Water Resources Research Institute, etc.  

At NDSU, I have taught both undergraduate- and graduate-level courses, covering media writing, multi-media content production, communication theory, and quantitative research methods. I also led Summer Institutes in Computational Social Science at NDSU (SICSS-NDSU) in 2022 and 2023. 

I received my Ph.D. in Journalism from The University of Texas at Austin. Prior to that, I obtained my M.A. and B.A. in Communication from Fudan University, China. With the support of Wee Kim Wee Scholarship, I spent one academic year as an exchange graduate student at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

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