Hannah O’Connell is an M.A./Ph.D. student in the Department of Communication at UCSB, where she also completed her B.A. in Communication Studies and B.S. in Psychological & Brain Sciences. Her research intersects family, interpersonal, and health communication, exploring resilience through an intergenerational lens. She examines how communication patterns and relational dynamics across generations persist, adapt, break down, and influence well-being during times of stress.

Katherine Carmichael is an MA/PhD student in the Department of Communication at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Carmichael's work seeks to answer 2 key question: 1) How can Communication scholarship be leveraged to reduce barriers to enacting climate action at governmental, societal, and organizational levels? 2) How can academia, Government, and society effectively collaborate to achieve shared goals? Carmichael's research interests stem from her time working as a climate staffer in state government, and are heavily intertwined with her active involvement in the Santa Barbara south coast community.

Emma is a first year MA-PhD student studying political communication and media effects. They received their bachelor's degree from UC San Diego, where they double majored in Sociology and Political Science, with concentrations in Culture and Communication and Data Analytics respectively. Prior to starting at UCSB, Emma's research covered a wide range of topics, including federally contracted research on mental health public policy, nonprofit program evaluation, and academic projects on social art history and gun violence.

Samantha Ulloa earned her B.A. in Psychology with a minor in Statistics from California State University, Monterey Bay. A former McNair Scholar and Sally Casanova Pre-Doctoral Scholar, she is a first-generation Latine M.A./Ph.D. student whose research examines how family dynamics shape partner selection and how these early influences inform communication patterns within romantic relationships. Her work intersects familial, cultural, and interpersonal communication, with a focus on supporting romantic partners in navigating conflict, expressing needs, and fostering effective communication.

Jinyeong Kim is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Communication at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research explores how digital and social media shape health communication-from public norms circulating on platforms to individual processes of self-perception and decision making.

She is particularly interested in the interplay between posters (i.e., senders) and viewers (i.e., receivers) on social media, investigating how their interactions influence perceptions of self and others as well as subsequent health behaviors. Her long-standing interest in eating disorders and body image informs this research, with particular attention to the dual role of social media in both perpetuating harmful descriptive norms and fostering recovery narratives that promote self-acceptance and healthier behaviors.

Methodologically, she mainly employs surveys, secondary data analysis, and computational approaches to capture the complexity of digital health contexts. 

Beyond academia, she founded "Mein Mine," a size-inclusive balletwear brand in South Korea, reflecting her commitment to expanding the scope of body representations and promoting inclusivity by challenging stereotypes.

Her ultimate goal is to guide evidence-based interventions which can enhance empowerment, inclusivity, and equitable understandings of health in contemporary digital environments.

Youjin Kim is interested in exploring how online conflicts, self-expression, silence, and particularly hate speech are shaped by the interplay between technological affordances, the characteristics of digital spaces, and psychological as well as sociological factors. Her research also examines AI-mediated communication, with a focus on both the potential and the challenges of using AI to regulate online hate. In addition, she studies how individuals use media and technology to construct their identities and how these processes influence participation and solidarity in offline contexts.

She received her B.A. in Social Psychology and Visual & Multimedia Design from Sookmyung Women's University. Before graduate study, she worked for over three years in the IT industry as a UX/UI designer, developing online platforms across various domains. She then earned her M.A. in Communication from Seoul National University and is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in Communication at UC Santa Barbara.

Ariana is an M.A./Ph.D. student in the Department of Communication at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research interests aim to explore how dark communication, particularly exposure to violence, verbal aggression, parental separation, or generational trauma, shapes family dynamics and relational health across the lifespan. She is especially interested in how adolescents growing up in high-stress households within Black and Latine/Hispanic communities carry these experiences into adulthood, influencing their attachment styles, communication maintenance behaviors, and satisfaction in romantic relationships. She aims to create scholarship that deepens academic understanding and informs practical solutions for improving communication in high-risk households. 

Breanna De Leeuw is a doctoral student in the Department of Communication at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research interests center on motivations for deceit during communicative episodes, as well as the personal and relational implications of these messages. Her previous work used quantitative research methods from self-report data to examine the influence of biological sex, relational intimacy, attachment orientations, relational uncertainty, and face concerns on deploying deceptive communication within romantic relationships. She also investigated the impact of deceptive communication on relational commitment and relationship satisfaction in intimate partnerships. Her future research goals center on elucidating the association between trust and deception in various interpersonal contexts. 

Jiaqi is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Communication at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His primary interest is how people interact with new communication technologies (e.g., smartphones, wearables, AI) in everyday life as well as their social and psychological consequences. To do this, he employs both quantitative and qualitative methods to examine momentary and long-term effects, including experience sampling method, longitudinal analysis, and experiments. His current research spans two key themes: (1) people's digital and emotional well-being at the convergence of everyday technology use and social interactions, and (2) understanding digital media effects on adolescents to foster positive and inclusive media socialization.