Bio

IMG_9861(photo by Joanne Pio)

I am an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at UC Santa Barbara. I research and teach organizational communication and small group communication. I am also a research affiliate at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence (CCI), which is part of the MIT Sloan School of Management. From 2014 to 2017, I was a post-doc at MIT CCI, and worked with Thomas W. Malone, Anita Williams Woolley, and Christopher F. Chabris on various funded projects aimed at measuring collective intelligence of human groups. My research focuses on measuring collective intelligence and understanding the structures and processes related to collective intelligence with respect to communication, coordination, physiological synchronization, and transactive memory system.

I graduated from the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism with a PhD in communication, and my dissertation advisor is Andrea Hollingshead. My dissertation examines how social motivation (prosocial or proself motivation) affects individuals’ information processing, particularly credibility evaluation, and their behaviors in the context of crowdfunding. I have conducted research on credibility evaluation and expert identification in both online and offline contexts; group collaboration and transactive memory; online social influence in consumer decision making; and (anti) brand communities on social media. I draw on theories from various disciplines such as communication, management, human-computer interaction, and social psychology, and use experiments, surveys, quantitative content analysis, and interviews. I have received several top paper awards from International Communication Association‘s Communication and Technology division and Organizational Communication Division. I have extensive university teaching experience, and have received numerous teaching awards including USC’s University Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award in 2014, the highest award given to graduate teaching assistants at the university.

Prior to USC, I completed Master’s coursework at Arizona State University’s Hugh Downs School of Human Communication and received Bachelor’s degree in mass communication from Yonsei University in South Korea.