The Digital Communication Research Lab
Current Members (alphabetically)
Emily A. Andrews is in her final semester of the Communication MA program at The University at Buffalo. Her research focuses broadly on health communication, message effects, persuasion, and misinformation. She is interested in prosocial attitude and behavior change. Emily will begin her doctoral studies at Northwestern University in fall 2021.
Devin Khayri Forde is a MA graduate from the Department of Communication at the University at Buffalo. Devin’s work explores the persuasiveness of different video game narratives. He’s passionate about media effects and explores the different ways media coverage and video games influence on our opinion on social protests and the depiction of social movements.
Anita Kuei-Chun Liu is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Communication at University at Buffalo. She received her MA in Communication and Information Studies from Rutgers University. Her research interests include the intersection of political and health communication. Currently, she is looking into the use of hashtag activism, using computational text analysis and network analysis, with a focus on the #TaiwanCanHelp campaign during COVID-19.
Ayse Lokmanoglu is a Ph.D. candidate in the Communication Department and a Presidential Fellow in the Transcultural Conflict and Violence Initiative. Her work focuses on the mechanisms of propaganda and persuasion used by violent extremist organizations and how they manipulate institutions and resources, such as monetary economics and gender, to create proto states. She uses a mixed-method approach including constitutive rhetoric, unsupervised machine learning, spatial territory approximations, network and time-series analysis. Lokmanoglu earned her M.A. in Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University and her B.A. in Economics and Near Eastern Studies from Cornell University.
Melissa M. Moore is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Communication at the University at Buffalo. She obtained her MA in Theatre Education at Emerson College in Boston, MA. Melissa's work explores the mechanisms of narrative persuasion and media effects, including belief and behavior change. Melissa is passionate about interdisciplinary work and applying mixed methodologies (both quantitative and qualitative) in her research.
Meredith L. Pruden is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Communication at Georgia State University, as well as a Presidential Fellow with the university’s Transcultural Conflict and Violence Initiative and a Fellow with The Institute for Research on Male Supremacism. Her interdisciplinary and mixed-method work is rooted in critical feminist media studies with specific attention to digital and visual cultures. She uses a combination of qualitative and quantitative computational techniques to explore misinformation, conspiracies and discourse in the area of white and male supremacy, violent misogyny and far-right politics.
Shu-An Tsai is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Political Science at University at Buffalo. She studies voting behavior, political communication, democratization in East Asia, and politics in the US, Taiwan, and South Korea. She is also interested in programming in R and Python. She is currently working on a project investigating communication and voting behavior, and a project about the influence of international media on US foreign policy.
Rui Wang is a Ph.D. student at University at Buffalo, at the Department of Communication. Her current interests are political communication, media effect and computational social science. Her current research project is exploring whether automated journalism could suppress the hostile media effect. She has a three year teaching experience in digital communication major at Anhui Normal University.
