Doctoral Students
Daniel Akselrad
daniel.akselrad@stanford.edu
CV
Akselrad uses historical and ethnographic methods to examine how media affect the sensemaking of individuals inside expansive bureaucratic institutions, information systems, and military infrastructures.
Sanna Ali
Ali is interested in politics of platforms and the civic good – specifically, she studies privatization of digitally-supported infrastructure and its implications on inequalities of access and distribution.
Ruth Appel
Appel is interested in the intersection of Behavioral Science and Computer Science, with the aim of leveraging psychological targeting ethically and for the common good.
Rachel Bergmann
Bergmann uses interpretive and archival methods to deeply and critically contextualize contemporary information technologies. Her research interests include histories of computing, feminist science and technology studies, and the cultural politics of AI and algorithmic systems.
Caitlin Burke
Burke is interested in user experience design, design ethics, and human-computer interaction.
Catherine Chen
Chen is interested in political psychology, especially the role of ideology and partisanship in decision making.
Yikun Chi
Chi is interested in leveraging media consumption and mobile sensing data and deep learning for the detection and prediction of mental well-being related issues.
Ross Dahlke
Dahlke researches the connection between online and offline civic life, particularly participation in political collective action such as social media use and political donations.
Matthew DeButts
Matt is interested in how institutions get people to believe things, especially in China and the United States (media, politics, beliefs).
Cid Decatur
Decatur focuses on the cognitive impacts of social media, social networks, language, and jargon online.
Cyan DeVeaux
DeVeaux is interested in augmented and virtual reality, human-computer interaction, and human-centered design.
Anna Gibson
Gibson is interested in how labor, especially civic labor, is practiced through digital platforms. Her interdisciplinary approach is informed theoretically by the sociology of labor, organizational studies, and STS. Gibson’s doctoral research focuses on the strategies that content moderators use to make sense of their work in light of competing industrial logics.
Tomás Guarna
Guarna is interested in the new meanings of citizenship, trust, and legitimacy in the digital public sphere.
Eugy Han
Han is interested in understanding how virtual reality environments and the embodiment of digital identities transform cognitive processes.
Young Jee Kim
Kim studies democratic processes for risk prevention in society through deliberative practices.
Angela Lee
Lee is interested in understanding the impact of media and technology on users’ health and well-being by studying psychological processes such as mindsets, particularly in the context of adolescent and parent-child relationships.
Yingdan Lu
Lu’s research focuses on digital media, political communication, global communication, and Chinese politics. She uses large-scale digital data and cutting-edge computational methods like computer vision, along with qualitative methods such as ethnography into the advancement of social scientific theory and analysis. Lu is currently on the academic job market for a faculty position starting 2023.
Marijn Mado
Mado studies media literacy education. She uses ethnographic methods to explore the practices and epistemological assumptions that underlie the design and teaching of media literacy programs.
Natalie Neufeld
Neufeld is interested in political polarization, party loyalty, and persuasion techniques that lead to lasting attitude change.
Michelle Ng
Ng is interested in how media can be leveraged by community-based organizations to advocate for more equitable natural resource management.
Rinseo Park
Park is interested in understanding how individual decision-making diverges from policy actors’ (e.g., political elites or scientific experts) views and the underlying cognitive processes.
Katherine Roehrick
Roehrick uses computational and linguistic analyses to study human-computer interaction and digital media. She is a Stanford Graduate Fellow.
Reagan Ross
Reagan is interested in the intersections of race, gender, and new media and technology. She is also interested in understanding how new technology might be used to disrupt anti-Black racism.
Serena Soh
Soh is interested in understanding the relationships between digital media use and well-being, specifically in the context of delivering personalized behavior change interventions through smartphones.
Sumer Vaid
Vaid’s research explores how digital media technologies can be used to study and alter psychological processes and outcomes. He is especially interested in a person-specific, computational and idiographic approach that examines the extent to which individual differ from each other in their response to different kinds of media.
Morgan Weiland
mweiland@stanford.edu
CV
morganweiland.com
Morgan N. Weiland is the Executive Director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School, where she received her JD in 2015. She is in the process of completing the first joint degree program between SLS and Stanford’s Communication Department, where she is a PhD candidate. Her dissertation investigates the structural role of speech platforms like Facebook and Twitter in the public sphere to understand what responsibilities these companies have to the public, and what policies ought to be enacted to ensure both free expression and accountability.
Weiland was a Lecturer in Law at SLS during the 2017-18 academic year, when she developed and taught a new course about platforms, law, and ethics with Professor Barbara van Schewick. She is also a Graduate Fellow at SLS’s Center for Internet & Society. She clerked for the Honorable M. Margaret McKeown on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals during the 2018-19 term. She is admitted to the California Bar.