About me
I am a computational communication scholar and an assistant professor with a joint appointment in the Missouri School of Journalism and the Institute for Data Science & Informatics at the University of Missouri. I study how people and digital platforms jointly shape access to information, judgments of credibility, and information inequality in health and politics.
What people encounter online depends on the questions they ask, the sources platforms select, and the social connections through which information circulates. Four questions organize my research:
Who produces, shares, and contests information and its credibility?
How do search results and social ties shape what becomes visible?
What might people encounter, and how can it be measured accurately?
How does information relate to understanding, attitudes, and action?
My current focus is AI-generated health information. I supervise research auditing Google AI Overviews across languages and over time, and am developing an experimental study of how these answers connect uncertain evidence to possible next steps.
Selected work
Auditing answers under uncertainty
Longitudinal and cross-language studies examine when Google AI Overviews appear, how their answers and sources change, and how health guidance communicates uncertainty and possible next steps.
How health information circulates
Network and content analysis identifies who supplies colorectal-cancer equity information, how it can travel through social connections, and which practical information remains scarce.
Finding information clinical terms miss
Word embeddings, recommendation networks, and human judgments expand the health content researchers can retrieve while preserving careful validation of what the resulting measures mean.
Methodological development is part of this agenda. I combine platform audits, language and network analysis, and survey research, and develop ways to evaluate computational measures through human judgment. My recent AURA study presents a workflow for assessing the alignment and usefulness of machine-generated topics in qualitative analysis.
Originally from Hanoi, Vietnam, I earned my M.A. in Communication at Ewha Womans University and my Ph.D. in Mass Communications at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Before joining Missouri in 2023, I was a postdoctoral associate in Communication at Cornell University.