Coordinating Team

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. He is also a non-residential faculty fellow at the Owen L. Coon Professor USC Annenberg Center on Public Diplomacy and a Co-Principal Investigator of the Comparative National Elections Project. 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. An expert in cross-national surveys and field experiments, Erik has led research projects in the United States, Russia, Ukraine, Serbia, Turkey, Iran, France, Great Britain, Germany, Poland, and several Arab countries. Erik has published over 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.

Ayse D. Lokmanoglu is an assistant professor at Clemson University and core faculty in Media Forensics Hub. She is a leadership member of Vox Pol Network and an affiliate of the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP). Her work takes a mixed-method approach that integrates computational methodologies, quantitative tools, and digital humanities to examine the mainstreaming of supremacist ideologies on the internet by state and non-state actors focused on race, gender, and religion. Her dissertation “Imagined Economics: An Analysis of Non-state Actor Economic Messaging” was awarded the 2022 National Communication Association Gerald R. Miller Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award. Her project “A Picture is Worth a Thousand (S)words: Classification and Diffusion of Memes on a Partisan Media Platforms” was funded by The Global Network on Extremism and Technology (GNET) Year 3 Award. She has published in journals including Information, Communication and Society, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, International Journal of Communication, Terrorism and Political Violence, Health Communication, Social Science and Medicine, and many others.

Olga Kamenchuk (Ph.D., Utah State University) is an associate research professor in the Institute for Policy Research and 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. Prior to 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 in Russian speaking spaces. Dr. Kamenchuk has over twenty years of professional experience working with governmental agencies, intergovernmental organizations, and NGOs on a diverse range of communication, program evaluation and research projects across many different policy contexts.

Yu Xu (Ph.D. University of Southern California) is an Assistant 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.

Yingdan Lu (PhD, Stanford University) is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies in the School of Communication 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, New Media & Society, Human-Computer Interaction, Computational Communication Research, and among other peer-reviewed journals.