Institute of Communications Research welcomes 2024 cohort of doctoral students

The Institute of Communications Research is excited to announce our newest cohort! Please learn more about the students' research interests below and join us in welcoming them to the University of Illinois College of Media community this fall. For more information, see full ICR student profiles.

Haochen Ji earned her master's degree in communication from Northwestern University and her bachelor's degree in public relations from Boston University. Her primary academic interests focus on the impact of emerging technologies on communication, aiming to promote human-centered technology designs and proactively shaping positive digital communication. She is passionate about exploring how technologies like AI, video games, and interactive media influence people's online behaviors and psychological well-being. She is also highly interested in utilizing mixed methods, especially computational approaches, to investigate specific problems.

Yujin (Floria) Lee earned her master's and bachelor's degrees in advertising from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her interests include virtual reality, artificial intelligence, social media marketing, celebrity endorsement, media usage, and cultural analysis.

Gustavo Nery earned a bachelor's in journalism from the University of Fortaleza and a master's in theatre studies from Illinois State University. Gustavo has professional experience as a film critic, reporter, and editor for books, magazines, and newspapers. His main area of research is television, film, theatre, and media studies. Interests include coming-of-age and teen cinema, queer cinema, Brazilian cinema, film theory and criticism, popular music, theater professional recordings, film biopics, and narrative theory.

Gillian Paxton is a researcher with interests in media literacy, scholastic journalism, visual communication, and education. She has actively blogged about media, including reviews and analysis, since she was in high school.

Duo Wang is a researcher and entrepreneur committed to exploring the convergence of mixed reality and generative AI for the next generation of immersive interaction and 3D storytelling. His research interests include virtual/augmented reality (VR/AR), human-AI communication in virtual environments, XR+AI simulation in healthcare, generative AI in immersive media, and human-computer interaction.

Kendra Williams is a researcher with interests in critical cultural studies, Black popular culture, television and film, and race and media representation.

Nansong Zhou is interested in the dynamic interactions between games, technology, and society. His research encompasses the global media industry, China studies, and game studies, focusing on two primary research areas including the formation of the global video game industry and how video games integrate with AI and VR technologies, along with their impacts and potential.