I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of South Florida.

My research asks: How do people make informed decisions in today’s digital media environment? My work examines: (1) how people process communication messages and form skepticism towards news and social media; (2) how to mitigate mis/disinformation, including fact-checking and media literacy intervention; and (3) how the broader communication ecology interacts with identity and social inequality in shaping misperceptions, policy preferences, and democratic attitudes.

My work has been published in peer-reviewed journals including Journal of Communication, Human Communication Research, New Media & Society, Political Communication, Mass Communication and Society, and Social Media + Society. My work also appeared in edited collections including The Routledge Companion to Media Disinformation and Populism (2021), Cambridge Elements in Politics and Communication (2022), and “An Epidemic on My People”: Religion in the Age of COVID-19 (forthcoming), as well as in public-facing outlets including The Washington Post, Brookings TechStream, and MediaWell.

My research has been funded by the Social Science Research Council, the International Fact-Checking Network, and the Knight Foundation, and has received top awards from the International Communication Association and the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. I received B.A. in Journalism and Sociology from Peking University, M.A. in Journalism and Mass Communication from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Ph.D. in Mass Communication from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.