The Annenberg Public Policy Center this week welcomed seven new postdoctoral fellows in the Science of Science Communication.
Here are the new postdoctoral fellows in the Science of Science Communication:
- Daniel Chapman received his Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His research broadly focuses on the intersection of environmental conservation, behavioral science, and international relations, with an emphasis on examining human dimensions of resource management, risk communication strategies, and methods of understanding and improving environmental decision-making. He also is a research scientist with the See Change Institute, a group of researchers and practitioners working to apply behavioral science insights to large-scale social problems such as household energy efficiency and humanitarian disasters.
- Kathryn Haglin earned her Ph.D. in Political Science from Texas A&M University. She was a Predoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Science, Technology, and Public Policy in the George Bush School of Government and Public Service. Her Ph.D. research examined the politics of science to address questions related to political knowledge, political identities, and information processing.
- Ozan Kuru obtained his Ph.D. in Communication at the University of Michigan, where he held a Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship. His dissertation examined partisan biases in perceptions of public opinion reports and the effectiveness of journalistic remedies in reducing such biases. He serves as a committee member of the False Accusations Against Surveys Ad Hoc Committee at the American Association for Public Opinion Research, preparing a report that addresses the partisan rhetoric and other credibility challenges for public opinion polls.
- Hang Lu received his Ph.D. in Communication from Cornell University. His primary research interest centers on environmental, science, health and risk communication. At the core, he investigates the psychological mechanisms underlying the effects of persuasive messages. He is particularly interested in the role of discrete emotions in influencing individuals’ information processing, judgments, and decision making.
- Matt Motta received his Ph.D. in Political Science (American Politics & Quantitative Methods) from the University of Minnesota. His research explores Americans’ attitudes toward science, experts, and science communication more generally. He is especially interested in the effect of interest in science on opinion toward scientists and scientific consensus, as well as the political implications of anti-expert attitudes
- Yotam Ophir received his Ph.D. in Communication from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on media effects and persuasion, combining novel computational tools for automated content analysis with experimental and survey designs to study the coverage and discourse of health and science issues in new and legacy media, and its effects on audiences’ perceptions and behavior.
- Dominik Stecula received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of British Columbia. His Ph.D. research examined the changes in the news media environment and its relationship to political polarization in the United States. Dominik is particularly interested in examining the nature of coverage of scientific issues in the news, the dynamics of public opinion polarization of scientific issues like climate change, safety of GMOs, and vaccinations, and the relationship between the two.
Four of our new postdoctoral fellows in the Science of Science Communication — Kuru, Lu, Ophir, and Stecula — will be based at the Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC). Chapman, Haglin, and Motta will be based at Yale University working with Dan Kahan, a professor of law and a professor of psychology at Yale Law School. Kahan, a former APPC visiting scholar and frequent collaborator in research with APPC, was a co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of the Science of Science Communication along with APPC director Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Dietram A. Scheufele, another former APPC visiting scholar.
Read more about them by clicking on their names.
