I am an assistant professor in the School of Journalism and the MU Institute for Data Science & Informatics at the University of Missouri-Columbia.

I was born and grew up in Hanoi, Vietnam. I then came to Ewha Womans University in South Korea to complete my M.A. in Communication. In May 2021, I successfully defended my doctoral dissertation and earned a Ph.D. in Mass Communications from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with a Ph.D. minor in Educational Psychology. I finished my postdoctoral training at Cornell University in the Department of Communication in 2023.

My research specializations are in political communication, digital media, and public opinion. I apply computational social science methods, including NLP, network analysis, to study the interactions between technologies and societies, particular the areas of algorithmic bias & auditing, personalization, and the cultures of online mis/disinformation. My dissertation examines the consequential impact of cognitive biases and algorithmic amplifications regarding polarizing social and political topics.

In my postdoctoral associate role at Cornell, I worked on a NIH-funded three-part research that deploys computational methods to understand the potentials for misinformation and racial disparities in the public information environment about colorectal cancer and colorectal cancer screening in the US. My first-authored work from the project that I led, in collaboration with colleagues from NYU and the University of Utah, was published in the JMIR Medical Informatics. Other related works from this project were published in the Preventive Medicine, and the Journal of the American College of Radiology.

You can find my other publications and articles on my Google Scholar profile, or my ResearchGate.

Data Science Focus

Incorporating data science approaches and methodologies is a big part of my research. I am an active member of the data science community, including the Computational Methods Division of the International Communication Association and Open Data Science Conference.

Outreach and Extension Focus

As a working member of MisinfoCon and Credibility Coalition, I actively collaborate with different community sectors to build solutions to online trust, verification, and fact checking. As societal impacts entailed from online mis- and disinformation become more far-reaching, it also becomes clear that practical insights can be drawn from the combination of different stakeholders to produce social goods.