Faculty Affiliates
Erik C. Nisbet (Ph.D., Cornell University) is the Owen L. Coon Professor of Policy Analysis & Communication and the founding director of the Center for Communication & Public Policy in the School of Communication at Northwestern University. His research lies at the intersection of political communication, public opinion, strategic communication, and public policy in the areas of science, technology, and environmental policy, democracy and elections, and international security. Erik has published nearly 60 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters in the fields of communication, political science, public health, and environmental sciences. His research has been supported by multiple grants from the National Science Foundation, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the U.S. Department of State, and Meta.
Olga Kamenchuk (Ph.D., Utah State University) is an Associate Professor of Instruction in the School of Communication at Northwestern University. She is a Co-Principal Investigator on the Comparative National Elections Project for Russian, Ukrainian, and Serbian electoral studies. Before joining Northwestern University, she was co-director of the Eurasian Security & Governance Program at the Ohio State University Mershon Center for International Security Studies and associate professor (clinical) in the OSU School of Communication. Her interdisciplinary research centers on strategic communication, public opinion, political psychology, and digital media.
Ayse D. Lokmanoglu (Ph.D., Georgia State University) is an assistant professor of emerging media studies at Boston University College of Communication. Her research is at the intersection of communication, computational social science, and digital humanities. She investigates how supremacist ideologies are propagated online by state and non-state actors, with a particular focus on issues of race, gender, and religion. Her work utilizes advanced computational methods, including automated text and visual analysis and network analysis, to provide insights into the digital strategies of supremacist groups.
Yingdan Lu (PhD, Stanford University) is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies in the School of Communication at Northwestern University and the director of the Computational Media and Politics Lab at Northwestern University. Her research focuses on digital technology, political communication, and information manipulation in authoritarian and democratic contexts. Her research employs both computational and qualitative methods to understand how authoritarian governments use digital media and artificial intelligence to maintain their rule, and how individuals experience digital technology in different media environments. Her work has appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as Political Communication, Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, New Media & Society, Human-Computer Interaction, and Computational Communication Research.
Yu Xu (Ph.D. University of Southern California) is an Associate Professor of Integrated Marketing Communications and, by courtesy, Communication Studies at Northwestern University. His research interests include media industries and analytics, social and communication networks, organizational change, ecology and evolution, and computational social science. His work has been published in leading journals such as Communication Research, Human Communication Research, Communication Monographs, New Media & Society, the Journal of Business Research, Political Communication, and Information Communication & Society.