COMM.STANFORD.EDU - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Associate Director, Center for Deliberative Democracy
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.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor
- Senior Fellow
- Associate Professor in the Department of Communication
- Associate Professor of Communication
- Director, Graduate Program in Coterminal Media Studies
Associate Professor of Communication, by courtesy, of Sociology and Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI
Angèle Christin is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication (and, by curtesy, of Sociology), a Richard E. Guggenhime Faculty Scholar, and Senior HAI Fellow at Stanford University. She studies the social impact of algorithms and AI.
Bingxu explores in the intersection of communication, psychology, and health. She is interested in harnessing technology-mediated communication to facilitate (mental) health support and help individuals navigate challenging psychological scenarios.
Job Titles:
- Lab Manager, VHIL
- Research and Technical
Bryan Defjan is a Media Studies student interested in how digital media influences mental health, group culture, and masculinity. He is concurrently pursuing a B.S. in Design with double minors in Art Practice and Digital Humanities. Bryan performs with Flying Treehouse, staffs at The Bridge, and directs photoshoots for MINT Magazine.
Byron Reeves, PhD, is the Paul C. Edwards Professor of Communication at Stanford and
Professor (by courtesy) in the Stanford School of Education. Byron has a long history of
Job Titles:
- Student in Communication, Admitted Autumn 2020
Burke is interested in user experience design, design ethics, and human-computer interaction.
Job Titles:
- Hearst Professional in Residence / Director, Big Local News
Decatur focuses on the cognitive impacts of social media, social networks, language, and jargon online.
DeVeaux is interested in augmented and virtual reality, human-computer interaction, and human-centered design.
Daania graduated with a BA in Political Science, a minor in Creative Writing , and honors in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality studies last spring and is focusing her Media Sudies masters on how streaming platforms are reshaping the entertainment industry, specifically in the music and comedy sectors. She is invested in how technology shapes the way we perceive and engage with art, and hopes to challenge preconceived narratives of race and gender through humor in her creative work. Professionally, she has experience in marketing, policy research, and management. She is a performer and artistic director for the Stanford Improvisors, enjoys reading about nuclear policy, and makes oddly specific Spotify playlists.
Daniel works at the intersection of technology, rhetoric, and organizations, using historical and ethnographic methods to study language, ideology, and organizational culture. He has used this lens to examine distributed decision-making in fighter jet cockpits, the role of euphemism in Nazi bureaucracy, and the internal communications of the global cigarette industry.
Barnstone studies the dynamics of media use in families with young children. He is particularly interested in understanding the influence of media exposure during infancy on child development and parental wellbeing.
Job Titles:
- Professor, Emeritus
- Thomas More Storke Professor, Emeritus
Donald Roberts received his A.B. from Columbia University (1961) and his M.A. from the University of California at Berkeley (1963). He earned his Ph.D. in communication at Stanford in 1968, then became a member of the department faculty, serving as Director of the Institute for Communication Research from 1985-1990 and from 1999-2001. He chaired the department from 1990-1996.
Roberts teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on communication theory and research and on children, youth, and media. His primary area of research concerns how children and adolescents use and respond to media, a topic on which he has written extensively (e.g., chapters in The Handbook of Communication, Learning from Television: Psychological and Education Research, The International Encyclopedia of Communications, The Handbook of Children and the Media,and The Handbook of Adolescent Psychology).
He has also written comprehensive reviews of the literature on the effects of mass communication for the Annual Review of Psychology and for the revised edition of the Handbook of Social Psychology, and co-authored a chapter on public opinion processes in the Handbook of Communication Science.
Roberts helped to design a parental advisory system to label violence, sex/nudity, and language for the computer software industry which has been adapted by the Internet Content Rating Association for use on the World Wide Web. He has spoken on the issue of content labeling and advisories internationally (e.g., Mexico, Korea, Australia, South Africa), and has published several articles dealing with content labeling.
He has consulted with a number of companies involved in producing children's media (e.g., Filmation, ABC-Disney, MGM Animation, Sunbow Entertainment, Nelvana Ltd., and KidsWB!), and currently functions as Educational Director for DIC Entertainment, helping to develop content to meet the FCC's requirements for educational programming for children. Roberts also served on the board of advisors of MediaScope, a nonprofit organization founded to promote constructive depictions of social issues in film, television, music, and video games, and was a planner and panelist for Vice President Al Gore's Conference on Families and Media.
Roberts is co-editor of The Process and Effects of Mass Communication and co-author of Television and Human Behavior, It's Not Only Rock and Roll: Popular Music in the Lives of Adolescents and Kids on Media in America: Patterns of Use at the Millennium.
Fetterolf is interested in how care work technologies shape and are shaped by the ongoing crisis of care in the US, particularly as this relates to workplace and intimate surveillance.
Zou is interested in how people come to know things online, which manifests in questions like: 1. How do online platforms and communities shape the content, process, and outcomes of political communication? and 2. How can we measure/interpret new norms and means of political engagement emerging out of online spaces?
Han is interested in understanding how virtual reality environments and the embodiment of digital identities transform cognitive processes.
Job Titles:
- Department Chair
- Director, Undergraduate Studies in Communication
- Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication / Chair, Department of Communication
- Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication / Chair, Department of Communication / Director, Undergraduate Studies in Communication
Job Titles:
- Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, Hearst Professor and Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor
- Assistant Professor of Communication
Gabriella Harari is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford University, where she directs the Media and Personality Lab.
She studies how personality is expressed in the physical and digital contexts of everyday life. Much of her research is focused on understanding what digital technologies reveal about who we are, and how use of digital technologies shapes who we are. Her current projects analyze people's everyday behavioral patterns (e.g., social interactions, mobility) and environmental contexts (e.g., places visited, social media platforms) to show how they are associated with individual differences in personality and well-being.
Harari takes an ecological approach to conducting her research, emphasizing the importance of studying people and their behavior in natural contexts. To that end, she conducts intensive longitudinal field studies and is interested in mobile sensing methods and analytic techniques that combine approaches from the social and computer sciences. For example, methodologies she uses in her work in include surveys, experience sampling, longitudinal modeling, mobile sensing, data mining, and machine learning.
Harari completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship and earned her PhD at the Department of Psychology at The University of Texas at Austin. She completed her BA in Psychology & Humanities from Florida International University, where she was also a Ronald E. McNair Scholar. Her work has been published in academic outlets such as Perspectives in Psychological Science, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and the Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT). Her work has also been supported by the National Science Foundation and Stanford HAI Seed Grant Awards.
Education
BA, Florida International University, Psychology & Humanities (2011)
PhD, The University of Texas at Austin, Psychology (2016)
Gary M. Pomerantz is a nonfiction author and journalist, and has served the past seventeen years as a lecturer in the Department of Communication at Stanford University.
His sixth and most recent book, The Last Pass, a New York Times bestseller about Bob Cousy and the storied Boston Celtics dynasty of the 1950s and sixties, is an intimate story about a basketball icon at ninety coming to terms with his racial regrets.
Pomerantz spent 17 years as a daily journalist, first as a sportswriter for The Washington Post where he covered Georgetown University basketball, and the National Football League, and later at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution where he wrote about race, sports, culture and politics, and served for a time on the newspaper's editorial board.
His nonfiction books cover a wide array of topics. The first, Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn, a multi-generational biography of Atlanta and its racial conscience, was named in 1996 a Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times.
Geri was Director of Photography at the San Jose Mercury News from 1993 to 2009. Under Geri's tenure, the Mercury News won major awards for photo editing and multimedia, sustaining the paper as a leader and innovator in digital visual journalism.
Geri was executive producer of a 2007 national News and Documentary Emmy Award-winning web documentary, "Uprooted." for the Mercury News. She was a newsroom leader for the coverage of the Loma Prieta earthquake awarded a 1990 Pulitzer Prize for General News Reporting for the Mercury News. She also edited the paper's coverage of California's recall election, a 2003 Pulitzer finalist in Feature Photography. Geri was a 2004-5 Knight Fellow at Stanford University, where she studied multimedia narratives. She is a 2013 inductee to the Missouri Photojournalism Hall of Fame.
Hunter Musi is a Co-Term in Media Studies and recently finished graduated his undergrad in International Relations with a minor in Spanish. He is interested in the intersection of media and U.S. Foreign Policy and is a freelance photojournalist.
Jake is a co-term student in Media Studies and graduated with a degree in political science in the spring. He is interested in how media affects the political climate. As an undergrad, he was on the golf team. In his free time, he enjoys playing guitar, watching TV, and hanging out with friends.
Job Titles:
- Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Professor, by Courtesy, of Communication and of Political Science
Nathaniel Persily is the James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, with appointments in the departments of Political Science, Communication, and FSI. Prior to joining Stanford, Professor Persily taught at Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and as a visiting professor at Harvard, NYU, Princeton, the University of Amsterdam, and the University of Melbourne. Professor Persily's scholarship and legal practice focus on American election law or what is sometimes called the "law of democracy," which addresses issues such as voting rights, political parties, campaign finance, redistricting, and election administration. He has served as a special master or court-appointed expert to craft congressional or legislative districting plans for Georgia, Maryland, Connecticut, New York, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. He also served as the Senior Research Director for the Presidential Commission on Election Administration. In addition to dozens of articles (many of which have been cited by the Supreme Court) on the legal regulation of political parties, issues surrounding the census and redistricting process, voting rights, and campaign finance reform, Professor Persily is coauthor of the leading election law casebook, The Law of Democracy (Foundation Press, 5th ed., 2016), with Samuel Issacharoff, Pamela Karlan, and Richard Pildes. His current work, for which he has been honored as a Guggenheim Fellow, Andrew Carnegie Fellow, and a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, examines the impact of changing technology on political communication, campaigns, and election administration. He is codirector of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, Stanford Program on Democracy and the Internet, and the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project, which supported local election officials in taking the necessary steps during the COVID-19 pandemic to provide safe voting options for the 2020 election. He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a commissioner on the Kofi Annan Commission on Elections and Democracy in the Digital Age. He received a B.A. and M.A. in political science from Yale (1992); a J.D. from Stanford (1998) where he was President of the Stanford Law Review, and a Ph.D. in political science from U.C. Berkeley in 2002.
James S. Fishkin holds the Janet M. Peck Chair in International Communication at Stanford University where he is Professor of Communication, Professor of Political Science (by courtesy) and Director of the Deliberative Democracy Lab.
He received his B.A. from Yale in 1970 and holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale as well as a second Ph.D. in Philosophy from Cambridge.
He is the author of Democracy When the People Are Thinking (Oxford 2018), When the People Speak (Oxford 2009), Deliberation Day (Yale 2004 with Bruce Ackerman) and Democracy and Deliberation (Yale 1991).
He is best known for developing Deliberative Polling® - a practice of public consultation that employs random samples of the citizenry to explore how opinions would change if they were more informed. His work on deliberative democracy has stimulated more than 100 Deliberative Polls in 28 countries around the world. It has been used to help governments and policy makers make important decisions in Texas, China, Mongolia, Japan, Macau, South Korea, Bulgaria, Brazil, Uganda and other countries around the world.
He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, and a Visiting Fellow Commoner at Trinity College, Cambridge.
Education
Ph.D., University of Cambridge, Philosophy (1976)
Ph.D., Yale University, Political Science (1975)
B.A., Magna Cum Laude, Yale College (1970)
Job Titles:
- Director, Journalism Program
- Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, Hearst
James T. Hamilton is Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, Hearst Professor of Communication, and Director of the Stanford Journalism Program. His most recent book is You Got In! Now What? 100 Insights into Finding Your Best Life in College (Radius Book Group, 2025). His books on media markets and information provision include All the News That's Fit to Sell: How the Market Transforms Information into News (Princeton, 2004), Regulation Through Revelation: The Origin, Politics, and Impacts of the Toxics Release Inventory Program (Cambridge, 2005), and Channeling Violence: The Economic Market for Violent Television Programming (Princeton, 1998). His book Democracy's Detectives: The Economics of Investigative Journalism (Harvard, 2016) focuses on the market for investigative reporting. Through research in the field of computational journalism, he is exploring how the costs of story discovery can be lowered through better use of data and algorithms. He is co-founder of the Stanford Computational Journalism Lab, Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, affiliated faculty at the Brown Institute for Media Innovation, and member of the JSK Fellowships Board of Visitors.
For his accomplishments in research, he has won awards such as the David N Kershaw Award of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management, the Goldsmith Book Prize from the Kennedy School's Shorenstein Center (twice), the Frank Luther Mott Research Award (twice), the Tankard Book Award, and a Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences Fellowship. Teaching awards from Harvard, Duke, and Stanford include the Allyn Young Prize for Excellence in Teaching the Principles of Economics, Trinity College Distinguished Teaching Award, Bass Society of Fellows, Susan Tifft Undergraduate Teaching and Mentoring Award, and School of Humanities and Sciences Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching.
Prior to joining the Stanford faculty, Hamilton taught at Duke University's Sanford School of Public Policy, where he directed the De Witt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy. He earned a BA in Economics and Government (summa cum laude) and PhD in Economics from Harvard University.
Education
Ph.D., Harvard University, Economics (1991)
B.A., Harvard University, Economics and Government (1983)
Hamilton's research focuses on computational journalism and he is exploring how the costs of story discovery can be lowered through better use of data and algorithms.
Job Titles:
- Professor ( Teaching ), Emeritus / Director Emeritus, John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships
Job Titles:
- Lecturer
- Founder and Senior Counsel for the First Amendment Project
James Wheaton is founder and senior counsel for the First Amendment Project, a public interest law firm which protects peoples' First Amendment rights to learn about and participate in public affairs. He is also president of the Environmental Law Foundation, a public interest environmental justice program in Oakland.
Wheaton has played prominent roles in a number of civic and professional groups, including co-chair of the Society of Professional Journalists Northern California Chapter's Freedom of Information Committee. He is the former executive director of California Common Cause; he also served as an Oakland Public Ethics Commissioner and as a member of the executive committee of the California State Bar Environmental Section.
Wheaton received his undergraduate degree from Brown University and his law degree from the University of California at Berkeley. He has taught at San Francisco State University and at Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism since 1999.
Job Titles:
- Professor of International Communication
- Professor of International Communication, Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Professor, by Courtesy, of Political Science
Fishkin's work focuses on deliberative democracy and democratic theory.
Janine Zacharia has reported on Israel, the Middle East and U.S. foreign policy for close to two decades including stints as Jerusalem Bureau Chief for the Washington Post, chief diplomatic correspondent for Bloomberg News, Washington bureau chief for the Jerusalem Post, and Jerusalem correspondent for Reuters. She appears regularly on cable news shows and radio programs as a Middle East analyst and is currently a visiting lecturer in the Department of Communication at Stanford University.
Job Titles:
- Founding Director of the Stanford Social Media Lab
- Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication
- Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Jeff Hancock is the founding director of the Stanford Social Media Lab and is Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication at Stanford University. Professor Hancock and his group work on understanding psychological and interpersonal processes in social media. The team specializes in using computational linguistics and experiments to understand how the words we use can reveal psychological and social dynamics, such as deception and trust, emotional dynamics, intimacy and relationships, and social support. Recently Professor Hancock has begun work on understanding the mental models people have about algorithms in social media, as well as working on the ethical issues associated with computational social science.
Hancock works on understanding psychological and interpersonal processes in social media.
Job Titles:
- Advisor
- Scientist
- Education
- Professor of Chinese Studies
- Professor of Communication
- Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute
Jennifer Pan is a political scientist whose research focuses on political communication, digital media, and authoritarian politics. She is the Sir Robert Ho Tung Professor of Chinese Studies, Professor of Communication and (by courtesy) Political Science and Sociology, and a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute.
Dr. Pan's research uses experimental and computational methods with large-scale datasets on political activity to answer questions about the role of digital media in politics, including how political censorship, propaganda, and information manipulation work in the digital age and how preferences and behaviors are shaped as a result. Her work has appeared in peer-reviewed publications such as the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Science, and Nature.
She graduated from Princeton University, summa cum laude, and received her Ph.D. from Harvard University's Department of Government.
Education
BA, Princeton University, School of Public and International Affairs (2004)
PhD, Harvard University, Government (2015)
Jennifer Pan Sir Robert Ho Tung Professor in Chinese Studies Professor of Communication Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute For International Studies jp1@stanford.edu 650.725.7326 jenpan.com McClatchy Hall, Rm. 330 Pan's research examines the role of digital media in the politics of authoritarian and democratic contexts. Read About Jennifer Pan
Job Titles:
- Director, Doctoral Program in Communication
- Founding Director of Stanford University 's Virtual Human Interaction Lab
- Professor, Senior Fellow
- Thomas More Storke Professor of Communication / Director, Doctoral Program in Communication
Jeremy Bailenson is founding director of Stanford University's Virtual Human Interaction Lab, Thomas More Storke Professor in the Department of Communication, Professor (by courtesy) of Education, Professor (by courtesy) Program in Symbolic Systems, and a Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment. He has served as Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Communication for over a decade. He earned a B.A. from the University of Michigan in 1994 and a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Northwestern University in 1999. He spent four years at the University of California, Santa Barbara as a Post-Doctoral Fellow and then an Assistant Research Professor.
Bailenson studies the psychology of Virtual and Augmented Reality, in particular how virtual experiences lead to changes in perceptions of self and others. His lab builds and studies systems that allow people to meet in virtual space, and explores the changes in the nature of social interaction. His most recent research focuses on how virtual experiences can transform education, environmental conservation, empathy, and health. He is the recipient of the Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching at Stanford. In 2020, IEEE recognized his work with "The Virtual/Augmented Reality Technical Achievement Award".
He has published more than 200 academic papers, spanning the fields of communication, computer science, education, environmental science, law, linguistics, marketing, medicine, political science, and psychology. His work has been continuously funded by the National Science Foundation for over 25 years.
His first book Infinite Reality, co-authored with Jim Blascovich, emerged as an Amazon Best-seller eight years after its initial publication, and was quoted by the U.S. Supreme Court. His new book, Experience on Demand, was reviewed by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Nature, and The Times of London, and was an Amazon Best-seller.
He has written opinion pieces for The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, CNN, PBS NewsHour, Wired, National Geographic, Slate, The San Francisco Chronicle, TechCrunch, and The Chronicle of Higher Education, and has produced or directed six Virtual Reality documentary experiences which were official selections at the Tribeca Film Festival. His lab has exhibited VR in hundreds of venues ranging from The Smithsonian to The Superbowl.
Education
B.A., University of Michigan, Cognitive Science (1994)
M.S., Cognitive Psychology, Northwestern University (1996)
Ph.D., Northwestern University, Cognitive Psychology (1999)
Job Titles:
- Professor of Communication
Jon Krosnick is a social psychologist who does research on attitude formation, change, and effects, on the psychology of political behavior, and on survey research methods. He is the Frederic O. Glover Professor in Humanities and Social Sciences, Professor of Communication, Political Science, and (by courtesy) Psychology. At Stanford, in addition to his professorships, he directs the Political Psychology Research Group and has directed the Summer Institute in Political Psychology.
To read reports on Professor Krosnick's research program exploring public opinion on the environment, visit the Public Opinion on Climate Change web site.
Jon A. Krosnick Frederic O. Glover Professor in Humanities and Social Sciences Professor of Communication Professor of Political Science krosnick@stanford.edu 650.725.3031 McClatchy Hall, Rm. 432 Krosnick does research on attitude formation, change, and effects, on the psychology of political behavior, and on survey research methods. Read About Jon Krosnick
Josie Gross-Whitaker is a senior at Stanford University, where she studies Communication and creative writing and is pursuing her M.A. in Media Studies. In her free time, Josie enjoys surfing, watching basketball, and hanging out with her dog.
Job Titles:
- Facilities Services Administrator
Hi everyone! My name is Kaitlyn Lim. I was an STS major during my undergrad and concentrated in Communication and Media. I am also on the softball team and hope we can make it back to the Women's College World Series this year! I am from Irvine, California and some of my hobbies include: going to the beach, enjoying boba, watching sunsets, and spending time outdoors.
Roehrick uses computational and linguistic analyses to study human-computer interaction and digital media. She is a Stanford Graduate Fellow.
Job Titles:
- Visiting Professor in Professional Journalism
Tumgoren is passionate about open source tools and platforms that help journalists uncover data-driven stories.
Malia Cortez is a senior at Stanford University, where she is studying communication and creative writing and pursuing her M.A. in Media Studies. In her free time, Malia loves listening to music, going to the beach, and learning about different cultures through art, food, and travel.
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.
Job Titles:
- Program Administrator, Stanford Journalism Program
Job Titles:
- Student in Communication, Admitted Autumn 2021
Matt is interested in how institutions get people to believe things, especially in China and the United States (media, politics, beliefs).
Job Titles:
- S CV
- Student in Communication, Admitted Autumn 2021
Ng examines how individuals act upon dynamic risk communication to protect their well-being during extreme weather events. By leveraging intensive longitudinal methods and collaborating with government and community partners, she aims to develop risk communication theory while building resilience to extreme weather in practice.
Santoso is interested in the social, psychological, and behavioral implications of virtual reality, particularly in the context of climate and sustainability.
Job Titles:
- Executive Director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School
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.
Nate Viotti is a student at Stanford University, jointly pursuing a master's degree in Communication and a bachelor's degree in International Relations. His research and coursework focus on comparative media policy and media economics, with his thesis analyzing interventions addressing the local journalism crisis across the United States and European Union. Nate has a background in research, policy analysis, journalism, and design, having worked for the U.S. Department of State, the U.S. House of Representatives, and various nonprofits and companies. He has lived and studied in France, Italy, and Jordan, and loves to travel and explore new cuisines in his free time.
Job Titles:
- Professor of Law / Professor of Communication by Courtesy
Nathaniel Persily Professor of Law Professor of Communication by courtesy npersily@law.stanford.edu 650.725.9875 Persily's scholarship and legal practice focus on American election law. Read About Nate Persily
Job Titles:
- Manager, Center for Deliberative Democracy
Job Titles:
- Professor of Communication / Professor of Psychology
- Professor of Communication and of Psychology
Nilam's research grows out of a history of studying change. After completing his undergraduate study of economics, he worked as a currency trader, frantically tracking and trying to predict the movement of world markets as they jerked up, down and sideways. Later, he moved on to the study of human movement, kinesiology, and eventually psychological processes - with a specialization in longitudinal research methodology. Generally, Nilam studies how short-term changes (e.g., processes such as learning, information processing, emotion regulation, etc.) develop across the life span, and how longitudinal study designs contribute to generation of new knowledge. Current projects include examinations of age-related change in children's self- and emotion-regulation; patterns in minute-to-minute and day-to-day progression of adolescents' and adults' emotions; and change in contextual influences on well-being during old age. He is developing a variety of study paradigms that use recent developments in data science and the intensive data streams arriving from social media, mobile sensors, and smartphones to study change at multiple time scales.
Vinoya is interested in how digital media can be leveraged as a tool to understand human behavior in a more natural context. Particularly, media habits can be captured to help unveil aspects of personality expression, well-being, and life outcomes.
Job Titles:
- Professor of Communication at Stanford University
Ocheze Amuzie ochezea@stanford.edu Ocheze is a Media Studies coterm student advised by Jeff Hancock.
Job Titles:
- Director of Finance and Operations
- Department
Job Titles:
- Communication and Professor, by Courtesy, of Education
- Professor of Communication
Reeves' research includes message processing, social cognition, and social and emotion responses to media.
Portia is interested in building up a theoretical framework towards understanding the role of personalized immersive technologies in supporting social and creative processes. She hopes to develop personalized tools for facilitating social interactions and the creative process in virtual and augmented reality and characterize how individuals and groups utilize these tools over time.
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.
Job Titles:
- Student in Communication, Admitted Autumn 2019
Reagan Ross's CV
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.
Becca Lewis researches ideological and social histories of Silicon Valley and the internet.
Regan Krause is a master's student in the Communication coterm pursuing a degree along the Media Studies track. She graduated from undergrad with a degree in Management Science and Engineering. Regan was also on the softball team and will be helping them as a graduate assistant. She is interested in the media's impact on consumer behavior.
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.
R.B. Brenner is a Lecturer in the Department of Communication. He returned to Stanford in 2018 after four years at the University of Texas at Austin, where he was a tenured full professor and director of the School of Journalism. He had been a Stanford Lecturer from 2010 to 2014.
His teaching is informed by a three-decade career as a reporter and editor. He held several prominent editing positions at The Washington Post, including Sunday Editor and Metro Editor. He was one of the primary editors of The Post's coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings, which was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2008, and played a leadership role in merging the digital and print newsrooms.
He has been a consultant for two journalism-themed films: "The Post" (2017) and "State of Play" (2009).
Appel combines insights and methods from psychology, political science and computer science to develop and evaluate evidence-based interventions to promote the social good. She is particularly passionate about preventing the spread of misinformation, promoting wellbeing and mental health, and addressing ethical challenges related to new technologies.
Moore is interested in older adults' digital media use.
Currently, Moore is developing and evaluating interventions to bolster (older) individuals' digital literacy and resilience to online misinformation. He is a recipient of the Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship (SIGF) and was formerly a member of the Communication and Cognitive Systems Lab at Ohio State.
Sacha's interdisciplinary research lies at the frontier of AI, public policy, and social justice. Her work particularly focuses on examining the role of AI governance and regulation in mitigating rising inequalities and power asymmetries driven by algorithmic systems.
Job Titles:
- Student Services, Faculty Affairs, Rebele Internship Program Director, Website Administrator
Serdar Tumgoren teaches data journalism in the Stanford Graduate Journalism Program and is an associate director for Big Local News, a project at Stanford that fosters collaborative data journalism and provides tools and platforms to help local newsrooms extend their reach.
Prior to joining Stanford in 2018, Serdar worked at The Associated Press, The Washington Post and Congressional Quarterly, with a focus on political and election-related data and Web applications.
A graduate of Georgetown University, Serdar began his career as a local government reporter in California, Connecticut, and New Jersey.
He is passionate about open source tools and platforms that help journalists uncover data-driven stories. He co-founded the OpenElections project, a volunteer effort to gather and standardize U.S. election data, and created datakit, a customizable tool to help journalists simplify and standardize their data analysis workflows.
Job Titles:
- Student in Communication, Admitted Autumn 2021
Soh is interested in understanding how identity development unfolds in the digital context, particularly in terms of how digital interventions can be designed to promote positive identity development.
Job Titles:
- Film and Media Studies
- Professor of Art and Art History and, by Courtesy, of German Studies and of Communication
- Professor of Film
Shane Denson is Professor of Film and Media Studies in the Department of Art & Art History at Stanford University. His research and teaching interests span a variety of media and historical periods, including phenomenological and media-philosophical approaches to film, digital media, comics, games, and serialized popular forms. He is the author of three books: Post-Cinematic Bodies (2023), Discorrelated Images (2020) and Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface (2014). He is also co-editor of several collections: Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives (2013), Digital Seriality (special issue of Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture, 2014), and the open-access book Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film (2016).
Shane Denson Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies Associate Professor of Communication by courtesy denson@stanford.edu His research and teaching interests span a variety of media and historical periods, including phenomenological and media-philosophical approaches to film, digital media, comics, games, and serialized popular forms. Read About Shane Denson
Shanto Iyengar William Robertson Coe Professor Professor of Political Science Professor of Communication siyengar@stanford.edu 650.723.5509 pcl.stanford.edu Encina Hall, Rm. 419 Iyengar's areas of expertise include the role of mass media in democratic societies, public opinion, and political psychology. Read About Shanto Iyengar
Job Titles:
- Professor of Communication, Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Job Titles:
- Associate Director, Social Media Lab
Tammer Bagdasarian is a master's student pursuing his degree in the Media Studies track. He earned an undergraduate degree from Stanford in Communication and is planning to pursue a career in artificial intelligence law. As an undergrad, he spent his time in leadership at The Stanford Daily, and at the Social Media Lab researching AI trust and safety. Through his Master's study, he plans to continue that work, specifically focusing on analyzing processes related to how AI systems trust humans.
Graciano is interested in reducing political polarization and ensuring policy-making is guided by the wishes of common citizens through the implementation of Deliberative Democracy methods.
Job Titles:
- Professor of Communication, Emeritus
Ted Glasser's teaching and research focuses on media practices and performance, with emphasis on questions of press responsibility and accountability. His books include Normative Theories of the Media: Journalism in Democratic Societies, written with Clifford Christians, Denis McQuail, Kaarle Nordenstreng, and Robert White, which in 2010 won the Frank Luther Mott-Kappa Tau Alpha award for best research-based book on journalism/mass communication and was one of three finalists for the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication's Tankard Book Award; The Idea of Public Journalism, an edited collection of essays, recently translated into Chinese;Custodians of Conscience: Investigative Journalism and Public Virtue, written with James S. Ettema, which won the Society of Professional Journalists' award for best research on journalism, the Bart Richards Award for Media Criticism, and the Frank Luther Mott-Kappa Tau Alpha award for the best research-based book on journalism/mass communication; Public Opinion and the Communication of Consent, edited with Charles T. Salmon; and Media Freedom and Accountability, edited with Everette E. Dennis and Donald M. Gillmor. His research, commentaries and book reviews have appeared in a variety of publications, including the Journal of Communication, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Critical Studies in Mass Communication, Journalism Studies, Policy Sciences, Journal of American History, Quill, Nieman Reports and The New York Times Book Review.
In 2002-2003 Glasser served as president of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. He had earlier served as a vice president and chair of the Mass Communication Division of the International Communication Association. He has held visiting appointments as a Senior Fulbright Scholar at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel; as the Wee Kim Wee Professor of Communication Studies at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore; and at the University of Tampere, Finland.
Glasser came to Stanford in 1990 from the University of Minnesota, where he taught in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication and served as associate director of the Silha Center for the Study of Media Ethics and Law. He has been affiliated with Stanford's Modern Thought and Literature Program since 1993. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Iowa.
Education
B.S., Baker University, Journalism and Political Science/History (1970)
M.S, Oklahoma State University, Mass Communication (1973)
Ph.D., University of Iowa, Mass Communication (1979)
Glasser's research focuses on media practices and performance, with emphasis on questions of press responsibility and accountability.
Job Titles:
- Director of the Master of Arts
- Professor of the Practice, Earth Systems
- Professor of the Practice, Earth Systems Program
Thomas Hayden is Director of the Master of Arts in Earth Systems, Environmental Communication Program at Stanford University. He teaches science and environmental communication and journalism in Stanford's School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences and Graduate Program in Journalism. He came to Stanford in 2008, following a career of reporting and writing about science and environmental issues for national and international publications.
Hayden's journalism career began at Newsweek magazine in New York, where he was an American Association for the Advancement of Science Mass Media fellow in 1997. In 2000, he moved to US News & World Report in Washington, DC, where he covered science, the environment, medicine, culture and breaking news as a senior writer. Since 2005, Hayden has been a freelance journalist. His cover stories have appeared in publications including Wired, Smithsonian, National Geographic, Washington Post Book World and many others. He has reported from South America, Europe, and Asia; and North America from New Orleans to the Canadian Arctic.
Hayden is coauthor of two books. He wrote the 2007 national bestseller On Call in Hell, about battlefield medicine in Iraq, with Navy doctor Richard Jadick. In 2008 he collaborated on the critically acclaimed Sex and War, about the biological evolution and cultural development of warfare through human history, with Malcolm Potts of the University of California, Berkeley. He was the lead writer on the 2010 9th revision of the iconic National Geographic Atlas of the World. And he was coeditor of and a contributor to The Science Writers' Handbook: Everything You Need to Know to Pitch, Publish and Prosper in the Digital Age, published in 2013.
In 2005, Hayden taught science writing in The Writing Workshops at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore with his wife and fellow science journalist, Erika Check Hayden. He was a founding faculty member in the annual Banff Centre Science Communications workshop, where he taught from 2006 until 2010, and was involved as a speaker and trainer with the Leopold Leadership Program for environmental scientists from 2000 to 2013.
Hayden graduated from his hometown school, the University of Saskatchewan, with a Bachelor of Science in Agriculture (honours) degree in applied microbiology and food science, and received an MS degree in marine biology from the University of Southern California. He completed five years of doctoral study in biological oceanography at USC, before leaving science for journalism with A.B.D. status. He spent more than nine months at sea cumulatively over five years, conducting oceanographic research from Southern California to San Francisco Bay, and from Antarctica to Easter Island.
In 2015, Hayden helped launch a new graduate degree program in Stanford's School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences. The Master of Arts in Earth Systems, Environmental Communication degree is focussed on the study and practice of effective, engaging, accurate communication of complex environmental and Earth systems information to nonspecialist audiences.
Job Titles:
- Professor, Senior Fellow
- Thomas More Storke Professor of Communication / Director, Doctoral Program in Communication
- Thomas More Storke Professor, Emeritus
Donald Roberts received his A.B. from Columbia University (1961) and his M.A. from the University of California at Berkeley (1963). He earned his Ph.D. in communication at Stanford in 1968, then became a member of the department faculty, serving as Director of the Institute for Communication Research from 1985-1990 and from 1999-2001. He chaired the department from 1990-1996.
Roberts teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on communication theory and research and on children, youth, and media. His primary area of research concerns how children and adolescents use and respond to media, a topic on which he has written extensively (e.g., chapters in The Handbook of Communication, Learning from Television: Psychological and Education Research, The International Encyclopedia of Communications, The Handbook of Children and the Media,and The Handbook of Adolescent Psychology).
He has also written comprehensive reviews of the literature on the effects of mass communication for the Annual Review of Psychology and for the revised edition of the Handbook of Social Psychology, and co-authored a chapter on public opinion processes in the Handbook of Communication Science.
Roberts helped to design a parental advisory system to label violence, sex/nudity, and language for the computer software industry which has been adapted by the Internet Content Rating Association for use on the World Wide Web. He has spoken on the issue of content labeling and advisories internationally (e.g., Mexico, Korea, Australia, South Africa), and has published several articles dealing with content labeling.
Guarna is interested in the new meanings of citizenship, trust, and legitimacy in the digital public sphere.
Job Titles:
- Professor and Professor of Political Science and of Communication
- Professor of Political Science / Professor of Communication
Shanto Iyengar is a Professor of Political Science and Director of the Political Communication Laboratory. Iyengar's areas of expertise include the role of mass media in democratic societies, public opinion, and political psychology. Iyengar's research has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Ford Foundation, the Pew Charitable Trusts, and the Hewlett Foundation. He is the recipient of several professional awards including the Philip Converse Award of the American Political Science Association for the best book in the field of public opinion, the Murray Edelman Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Goldsmith Book Prize from Harvard University. Iyengar is author or co-author of several books, including News That Matters (University of Chicago Press, 1987), Is Anyone Responsible? (University of Chicago Press, 1991), Explorations in Political Psychology (Duke University Press, 1995), Going Negative (Free Press, 1995), and Media Politics: A Citizen's Guide (Norton, 2011).
Job Titles:
- Professor of Communication
Jacks Family Professor of Education
Professor of Communication by courtesy
Faculty co-director of the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society
woodyp@stanford.edu
His interests focus on the processes through which ideas and practices move across organizations, and the role of networks in facilitating or hindering the transfer of ideas.
Li's research examines questions surrounding the relationship between information technology and knowledge production and its role in the organization of social life.
Kim studies democratic processes for risk prevention in society through deliberative practices.
Zhenchao is interested in (intensive) longitudinal methods, social media uses and effects, interpersonal relationships, children and adolescents' identity development, sexuality, and well-being. Read About Zhenchao Hu