Ismaharif is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Communication at UC Santa Barbara. At the intersection of motivation science, social identity and the media, Ismaharif broadly studies group processes, intergroup relations and "wise" psychological interventions. His recent research examines barriers to civil discourse that hinder national progress, leveraging communication technologies (e.g., GenAI chatbots) to understand and address these motivational barriers. His work draws on social psychological theories and adopts a multi-method approach, including experimental designs, longitudinal studies, fieldwork interventions, big-team science, public datasets and computational methods.

Ismaharif's work has been published in leading journals from diverse disciplines such as Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Computers in Human Behavior, Social Psychological and Personality Science, Political Psychology, and Human Communication Research. His scholarship has been recognized internationally, including the Top Paper Award from the Intergroup Communication Division (2025) and Mass Communication Division (2020) of the International Communication Association, and the Gene Burd Top Three Paper Award from the Communication Technology Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (2018). His research activities have been supported by various external (e.g., MOE-START Scheme and DSO National Laboratories) and internal funding sources (e.g., UCSB Regents Fellowship).

Margot Plunkett is a M.A./Ph.D. student in the Department of Communication at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She received Communication and English (Literature) degrees from Barrett, the Honors College at Arizona State University. Margot examines toxic workplaces to unearth the rationale behind bullying, aiming to facilitate new ways individuals can combat unhealthy behaviors. Margot's research interests centralize the anticipatory socialization and assimilation process, emotions in the workplace, humanistic management, and workplace bullying. Qualitative research is her preferred method for its ability to draw out in-depth, first-hand accounts of participants' experiences. Margot is a research affiliate for the International Humanistic Management Affiliation. Her work has appeared in the Humanistic Management Journal. Ultimately, Margot's scholarly pursuits seek to engender healthier organizational cultures and encourage dialogue that is honest, antitoxic, and geared towards rejecting incivility in organizations.

Sofia Cavaness is a doctoral student in Organizational Communication. Her research examines how intergenerational interactions shape the way officers navigate organizational socialization in law enforcement, contributing to theory on identity formation, role negotiation, and knowledge transfer in high-reliability organizations. 

Law enforcement offers a high-stakes window into a challenge facing many professions: how do organizations manage members who hold differing beliefs about what the work should demand of them, and how do those interactions shape organizational culture?

Grounded in fieldwork, Sofia currently studies how mentorship shapes law enforcement agency dynamics and how knowledge is passed from veterans to newer officers. She works collaboratively with law enforcement agencies, with her research designed to understand what shapes sustainable careers in policing, and what gets in the way. 

Prateekshit (pruh-TEEK-shit), who goes by Kanu (kuh-noo), is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Communication at UCSB, and specializes in political communication. His active research program uses computational methods (e.g. network analysis), survey experiments, and neuroimaging techniques to investigate the effects of political entertainment, especially humor and satire, on democratic participation, news sharing, and individual political agency, with comparative focus between the United States and South Asian contexts. On various aspects of this program, he has led and collaborated on several online experimental surveys and neuropsychological studies with fluency in advanced computational analyses (R, Python), as well as peer-reviewed publications in broad interest journals including Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences, and field-specific journals such as Journal of Communication, International Journal of Communication, and Health Psychology. Before joining UCSB, Kanu completed his Ph.D. in the Summer of 2022 at the Annenberg School for Communication at UPenn, where he was also a postdoctoral fellow, appointed jointly between the Communication Neuroscience Lab and the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication. Complementing his academic work on humor, Kanu is also a professional improvisational comedian. Between 2019 and 2023, he was part of ensembles at Comedy Sportz Philadelphia, where he performed and taught improvisational comedy.

Qiyao Peng is a Ph.D. student in Communication at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research focuses on persuasion, health communication, and computational social science, with an emphasis on how message design and digital media environments influence (health) behaviors and health-related decision-making. Drawing on communication theories, she examines how emotional appeals, multimodal message features, and online social interactions shape audience perceptions, psychological reactance, and behavioral intentions.

Her methodological expertise spans experimental design, large-scale social media analysis, natural language processing, and computer vision. She has applied these approaches to study topics including anti-vaping public service announcements, cancer prevention messaging, etc.

Qiyao's work integrates theoretical rigor with practical implications, aiming to inform the development of more effective health messages and campaigns. 

Yidi Zhang is a doctoral student in the Department of Communication at University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research interests lie at the intersection of computer-mediated communication and interpersonal communication. Specifically, she is interested in the social influence of communication technologies and how mediated communication changes people's interpersonal interactions. Her research work falls under the following agenda: 1) The reciprocal effects of self-presentation and self-identification online; 2) Self-effects of communicating in mediated contexts; 3) The utility of AI as an intervention agent in online discussions. Her works cover topics including vicarious interpersonal interaction, online partial self-presentation and impression management, and online hate. 

Yifei Wang is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Communication at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research interests center around social identity, information behavior, and economic inequality. Using surveys, experiments, and computational methods, he examines the display of social identities in the digital space and its influence in information behaviors and sociopolitical attitudes. He is especially interested in the ways socioeconomic status and class identity are shaped and perceived in communication. His research has appeared in outlets such as Journal of Communication, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Computational Communication Research, and Social Science Computer Review.

Alan Crawley is a doctoral student at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has been studying Nonverbal Communication for the past 13 years, giving online classes for international students and universities from over thirteen Spanish-speaking countries. He is interested in every field, application, phenomenon, and interaction in which nonverbal behaviors impact in some way human interactions.

 

Yidi Wang (ABD, UC Santa Barbara) is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Communication at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research program spans three interconnected areas: (1) identifying persuasive message features that generate both intended and counterproductive effects, (2) theorizing how sociocultural factors shape health communication, and (3) advancing methodological approaches in communication research. Her work has appeared in journals such as Health Communication, Environmental Communication, Risk Analysis, and the Journal of Media Psychology. She has received the Top Student Paper and the Graduate Student Mentorship Award at NCA. Currently, Yidi is the lab manager for Dr. Jiaying Liu's NIH-funded K01 project, a longitudinal study investigating factors that influence e-cigarette use among youth and young adults. She also leads subprojects on several psychophysiological methods and other grant-funded initiatives.

Jiaying liu received her Ph.D. from the Annenberg school for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on health communication, persuasion and social influence, message effects, computational and psychophysiological methods. Her recent research projects include conducting longitudinal analysis on nationally representative survey data to identify factors that predispose youth to cigarette and e-cigarette use; implementing online and eye-tracking experiments to identify persuasive message features and inform campaign formative evaluation; combining crowdsourcing and machine-based textual analysis to annotate large media text corpora; and employing neuroimaging methods to examine the underlying mechanisms of successful and counterproductive communication. Dr. Liu is actively involved in highly collaborative, interdisciplinary work. Her research has been published in leading communication, public health and psychology journals including Journal of Communication, Human Communication Research, Communication Research, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Communication Methods and Measures, Health Communication, American Journal of Preventive Medicine, and Psychological Bulletin. She currently serves as a senior editor for Health Communication. Dr. Liu directs the Communication, Health, and Emerging Media Laboratory (CHARM Lab), and currently serves as the principal investigator on K01 and R21 awards, and a co-investigator on two R01 awards from the National Institutes of Health. She teaches courses in health communication, persuasion and social influence, message effects, and computational textual analysis methods.

The Communication, Health, and Emerging Media (CHARM) Laboratory

The CHARM lab examines the cognitive, emotional, and social mechanisms underlying communication processes that shape people’s behaviors and health decision-making against the backdrop of the current new media landscape. Employing self-report survey measures, online and eye-tracking lab experiments, computerized textual analysis, and neuroimaging methods, researchers in the lab focus on theory-based persuasive health message design, social media analytics to unveil and track user-generated health discussions, and identifying environmental and individual level factors contributing to health behavior outcomes. CHARM lab looks to identify ways in which communication could be optimally leveraged to promote desirable health behavior changes, especially among vulnerable, marginalized, and underserved groups.

Selected Publications: 

Liu, J., Wang, Y., & Gay, J. (2025). Promising campaign themes to promote active pro-environmental behaviors among U.S. coastal residents. Environmental Communication, 1-25. DOI: 10.1080/17524032.2024.2441948

Liu, J., Shi, Z., Fabbricatore, J. L., McMains, J. T., Worsdale, A., Jones, E. C., Wang, Y., & Sweet, L. H. (2024). Vaping and smoking cue reactivity in young adult non-smoking electronic cigarette users: A functional neuroimaging study. Nicotine and Tobacco Research, ntae257. DOI: 10.1093/ntr/ntae257

Liu, J., Shi, R., & Hornik, R. (2024). Modification mechanisms of descriptive norm perceptions toward vaping: The role of behavior prevalence and group size in an online setting. Health Communication, 1–13. DOI: 10.1080/10410236.2024.2344883

Yang, S., Cotter, L. M., Lu, L., Kriss, L.A., Minich, M., Liu, J., Silver, L., Cascio, C.N. (2024). Countering online marketing and user endorsements with enhanced cannabis warning labels: An online experiment among at-risk youth and young adults. Preventive Medicine. DOI: 10.1016/j.ypmed.2024.107877

So, J., & Liu, J. (2023). The role of audience favorability in processing (un)familiar messages: A heuristic-systematic model perspective. Human Communication Research, 49(4):383-395. DOI: 10.1093/hcr/hqad024

Siegel, L., Liu, J., Gibson, L., & Hornik, R. (2022). Not all norm information is the same: Effects of normative content in the media on young people’s perceptions of e-cigarette and tobacco use norms. Communication Research, 00936502211073290. DOI: 10.1177/00936502211073290

Hornik, R., Binns, S., Emery, S., Epstein, V. M., Jeong, M., Kim, K., Kim, Y., Kranzler, E. C., Jesch, E., Lee, S. J., Levin, A. V., Liu, J., O’Donnell, M. B., Siegel, L., Tran, H., Williams, S., Yang, Q., & Gibson, L. A. (2022). The effects of tobacco coverage in the public communication environment on young people’s decisions to smoke combustible cigarettes. Journal of Communication, jqab052. DOI:10.1093/joc/jqab052

Lee, S. J., & Liu, J. (2021). Leveraging dynamic norm messages to promote counter-normative behaviors: The moderating role of current and future injunctive norms, attitude and self-efficacy. Health Communication, 38(6), 1071–1079. DOI: 10.1080/10410236.2021.1991638

Liu, J., Phua, J., Krugman, D., Xu, L., Nowak, G., & Popova, L. (2020). Do young adults attend to health warnings in the first IQOS advertisement in the U.S.? An eye-tracking approach. Nicotine & Tobacco Research, 23(5), 815-822. DOI: 10.1093/ntr/ntaa243

Murashka, V., Liu, J., & Peng, Y. (2020). Fitspiration on Instagram: Identifying topic clusters in user comments to posts with objectification features. Health Communication, 36(12), 1537–1548. DOI: 10.1080/10410236.2020.1773702

Liu, J., O’Donnell, M., & Falk, E. (2020). Deliberation and valence as dissociable components of counterarguing among smokers: Evidence from neuroimaging and quantitative linguistic analysis. Health Communication. 36(6), 752-763. DOI: 10.1080/10410236.2020.1712521

Liu, J., Lochbuehler, K., Yang, Q., Gibson, L. A., & Hornik, R. C. (2020). Breadth of media scanning leads to vaping among youth and young adults: Evidence of direct and indirect pathways from a national longitudinal survey. Journal of Health Communication, 25(2), 91–104. DOI: 10.1080/10810730.2019.1709925

Liu, J., Siegel, L., Gibson, L. A., Kim, Y., Binns, S., Emery, S., Hornik, R. C. (2019). Toward an aggregate, implicit and dynamic model of norm formation: Capturing large-scale media representations of dynamic descriptive norms through automated and crowdsourced content analysis. Journal of Communication, 69(6), 563–588. DOI: 10.1093/joc/jqz033

Sangalang, A., Volinsky, A.C., Liu, J., Yang, Q., Lee, S., Gibson, L.A., & Hornik, R.C. (2019). Identifying potential campaign themes to prevent youth initiation of e-cigarettes. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 56(5), S65–S75. DOI: 10.1016/j.amepre.2018.07.039

Liu, J., & Shi, R. (2018). How do online comments affect perceived descriptive norms of e-cigarette use? The role of quasi-statistical sense, valence perceptions, and exposure dosage. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. DOI:10.1093/jcmc/zmy021

Liu, J., Zhao, S., Chen, X., Falk, E., & Albarracín, D. (2017). The influence of peer behavior as a function of social cultural closeness: A meta-analysis of normative influence on adolescent smoking initiation and continuation. Psychological Bulletin, 143(10):1082–1115. DOI: 10.1037/bul0000113

Liu, J., & Hornik, R. (2016). Measuring exposure opportunities: Using exogenous measures in assessing effects of media exposure on smoking outcomes. Communication Methods and Measures, 10(2–3), 115–134. DOI: 10.1080/19312458.2016.1150442