People
Melissa Aronczyk (Co-Chair)
Melissa Aronczyk is Professor of Media Studies in the School of Communication & Information at Rutgers University. She is an expert in information politics in online and offline environments. Her research examines organized persuasion and influence brokers, promotional strategies and campaigns, and their implications for democracy and public life.
Youngrim Kim (Steering Committee)
Youngrim Kim is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University. Her research investigates how state institutions build and utilize digital technologies to manage complex governance challenges, especially in cases of imminent public health or environmental crises. She uses qualitative methods and ethnographic fieldwork to uncover how these emerging crisis-response technologies shape the ways we make sense of, and react to, moments of risk, uncertainty, and disturbance.
Yonaira M. Rivera (Steering Committee)
Yonaira (Yoni) Rivera is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication, an Associate Member of the Cancer Prevention and Control Program at the Rutgers Cancer Institute, and a member of the Rutgers Global Health Institute. Her scholarship focuses on reducing health inequities and improving the well-being of Latino/a/x and underserved communities through health communication initiatives. She uses qualitatively-driven, mixed methods and community-based participatory research to study social media health misinformation, cancer control and prevention, and disaster relief. She also studies how large language models can communicate health information in accessible, reliable, and culturally sensitive ways.
Jeffrey Lane (Co-Chair)
Jeffrey Lane (Ph.D. Princeton University) is an Associate Professor of Communication and Affiliate Graduate Faculty of the Sociology Department at Rutgers University. He is the author of The Digital Street (Oxford University Press), a neighborhood study of social media use. He uses urban and digital fieldwork methods to examine communication, technology, and social inequality.
Caitlin Petre (Steering Committee)
Caitlin Petre is an Associate Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. Her work examines the social processes, organizations, and actors behind the algorithms that govern the contemporary world. Petre’s book, All the News That’s Fit to Click (Princeton University Press), offers an ethnographic look at how web analytics transformed the work of journalism. Her scholarship has been published in Social Media & Society, the International Journal of Communication, the American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Digital Journalism, and others. She has been featured or quoted in popular publications such as the New York Times, the Guardian, the American Prospect, WIRED, and the Atlantic. Petre holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from New York University and was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School.
Grant Lattanzi (Coordinator)
Grant is a Ph.D. student in Communication, Information, and Media at Rutgers whose dissertation research is examining ‘climate tech’ coalitions situating urban infrastructures as sites for technologized ‘disruption.’ As an interdisciplinary scholar, Grant draws from across the social sciences to ask questions at the intersection of technology and culture, with prior projects examining emerging technologies and civic participation, and digital platforms and public culture. Grant holds an M.A. in Communication, Culture, and Technology from Georgetown University.