About

I’m Angela Y. Lee and I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Communication at Stanford University. I work in the Social Media Lab with Dr. Jeffrey Hancock. My work is supported by the Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship, the Stanford Social Impact Labs, and the Haas Center’s Graduate Fellowship for Public Service. I am on the academic job market this year.

I study how people’s beliefs shape the dynamics of computer-mediated communication. My research program examines how people communicate with and through technology, with an emphasis on understanding how people perceive and interpret these mediated experiences in meaningfully different ways. I integrate theories from media psychology and social cognition to investigate the impact of these perceptual differences on downstream psychological, behavioral, and social processes. My work advances communication research by revealing the critical role of people’s beliefs in three domains: 1) the effects of social media use on psychological well-being, 2) responses to human-AI interaction and communication, and 3) community resilience to digital threats like misinformation.

I use rigorous, quantitative methods to advance these lines of inquiry. My approach combines surveys, lab and field experiments, and analysis of digital behavioral data to comprehensively examine online communication dynamics. I specialize in developing novel, psychometrically validated questionnaires that capture nuanced beliefs about technology with precision, and I design innovative experimental paradigms that test the effects of these beliefs on individual, relational, and collective outcomes with advanced statistical methods. Developing new methods and measures allows me to identify mechanisms that explain heterogeneous media effects and when mediated communication is most beneficial or harmful.

My research has been published in venues such as the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Communication Research, New Media + Society, PNAS Nexus, and the Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW). I received dual B.A.’s in Psychology and Communication, and my Master’s degree in Communication at Stanford.

Please feel free to connect with me by email (angela8@stanford.edu) if you’re interested in this work! You can access a copy of my CV [here] (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EOJVfKT0_tuaSiB90TsU0HUtVLvIThSH/view?usp=drive_link).