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 graduate student currently working towards getting her M.A. in the field of organizational communication with an emphasis on cultural studies.

Sofia's interest lies in exploring the organizational dynamics of high reliability organizations (HROs) within natural resource agencies. Her research looks at the articulation of organizational values and how such values shape public engagements. She is interested in studying the ways that these organizations deal with identity, right and wrong and how personnel get cultural interlopers to interact with the environment. 

Sofia is also interested in examining non-traditional organizational frameworks to better understand and interpret the mechanisms through which these unique organizations operate. 

With a profound love for the outdoors and a deep commitment to understanding organizational dynamics, Sofia Cavaness seeks to bridge her personal passions with her academic pursuits. 

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 interested in computer-mediated communication, media effects, and health communication. She is dedicated to uncovering the impact of new media and emerging technologies on health-related behaviors and outcomes, particularly among older adults and marginalized communities.

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. She is passionate about the social influence of communication technologies. Her works cover topics including vicarious interpersonal interaction, online partial self-presentation, and impression formation.

Yifei Wang is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Communication at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research interests center around intergroup dynamics, information behavior, civic engagement, and computational social science. He aims to adapt surveys, experiments, and computational methods to investigate (1) the antecedents of consequences of displaying social identities in the digital space (e.g., identity threat, morality) and (2) the information behaviors associated with political identities (e.g., information-seeking, selective avoidance). His research has appeared in outlets such as Social Science Computer Review, Behavior & Information Technology, Communication Studies, and the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.

Alan Crawley is a doctoral student at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has been studying Nonverbal Communication for the past 11 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 is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Communication, focusing on understanding substance use and health misinformation sharing. Currently, she serves as the lab manager for Dr. Jiaying Liu’s K01 project, a longitudinal study investigating factors influencing e-cigarette use among youth and young adults. Her research explores the underlying mechanisms of successful and counterproductive communications to promote health outcomes and enhance public health through effective anti-vaping campaigns and interventions. Yidi is passionate about understanding health misinformation and its correction, driving her to explore the factors behind its spread and the social and psychological influences on information dissemination. Her work has been presented at academic conferences.

Yidi Wang is a dedicated researcher with a profound interest in employing a combination of quantitative and qualitative methodologies for her scholarly pursuits. Her research repertoire includes utilizing diverse techniques, such as eye-tracking, to gain valuable insights into cognitive processes during health communication encounters. She fulfills the role of an MRI scanning operator, employing neuroimaging methods to investigate the neural correlates of message effects. Additionally, Yidi incorporates interviews as a means to delve deeply into the realm of health misinformation sharing and relational correction, enriching her exploration of this research area.

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, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Communication Methods and Measures, Health Communication, American Journal of Preventive Medicine, and Psychological Bulletin. She currently serves on the editorial board of health communication as an associate editor. Dr. Liu directs the communication, health, and emerging media laboratory (CHARMlab), and currently serves as the principal investigator on k01 and r21 awards from the national institutes of health. She teaches courses in health communication, persuasion and social influence, message effects, and empirical research 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.