معرفی
Yingdan Lu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University's School of Communication. She serves as Director of the Computational Media and Politics Lab, co-director of the Computational Multimodal Communication Lab, and is core faculty in Northwestern's Media, Technology, and Society (MTS) and Technology and Social Behavior (TSB) PhD programs. She is also affiliated with the Center for Communication & Public Policy and the Center for Human-Computer Interaction + Design.
Her educational background includes a Ph.D. in Communication from Stanford University (2023), where she also earned a Ph.D. minor in Political Science and an M.A. in East Asian Studies. She received her B.A. in Journalism and Communication from Tsinghua University.
Dr. Lu's research centers on digital technology, political communication, and authoritarian politics, with two primary focus areas: the role of digital technologies in authoritarian politics, and multimodal communication across different contexts. Her work employs computational and qualitative methods to examine how authoritarian governments use digital media and AI to maintain rule, and how individuals experience technology in different media environments. As a computational social scientist, she advances methods for analyzing multimodal data (images, videos), cross-lingual digital communication, and mixed-method research.
Her publications reveal a consistent focus on digital authoritarianism, particularly Chinese state propaganda on social media platforms, multimodal communication analysis, and information manipulation. Her work spans interdisciplinary outlets including Political Communication, New Media & Society, International Journal of Press/Politics, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Dr. Lu's research has received funding from the National Science Foundation, Brown Institute for Media Innovation, and the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. She is the founder of COMputation Island ("计传岛"), a WeChat-based platform serving over 10,000 Mandarin-speaking scholars in computational communication research.
She leads the Computational Media and Politics Lab and co-directs the Computational Multimodal Communication Lab, where she develops innovative frameworks for analyzing multimodal data and promotes mixed-method approaches to computational social science research.
