Yes, I will be recruiting 1-2 PhD students starting Fall 2027 at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign School of Information Sciences.
Broadly speaking, I study how AI and emerging technologies impact online news and civic information consumption. Concretely, in the next few years, I anticipate my lab will tackle research problems around:
- Understanding trade-offs between keeping up-to-date with the news and mental health and wellbeing; including developing LLM-aided methods to measure informedness and deploying interventions to ease these tradeoffs
- Measuring how LLMs are transforming our relationship to news and civic information online across contexts
- Studying the evolving technological practices and tools of information workers such as journalists, Wikipedia editors, content moderators, etc.
All candidates should have an interest in combining technical and societal perspectives to understand how technologies transform our information ecosystem. For the Fall 2027 cycle, I am prioritizing technical students, though I am open to a variety of candidates with complementary strengths. These are examples of candidates that would do well in my lab:
- Candidates with experience building systems and strong technical skills (e.g., programming, machine learning, software development), who are interested in pursuing research in Human-Computer Interaction
- Candidates from a journalism or communication background, who are interested in how the role of journalists, news influencers, and other information workers is changing with AI and other emerging technologies
- Candidates with a strong social science and quantitative analysis background who want to apply these skills to information science problems
These are examples of backgrounds that align well with my research, but I encourage applications from candidates with other relevant experiences who can articulate how their background connects to my work. I am looking for candidates that bring in a variety of perspectives, and having work experience prior to the PhD is a positive in my book. Regardless of background, strong candidates demonstrate intellectual curiosity and the ability to approach complex sociotechnical problems with care.
Interested students should apply to either the Information Sciences or the Informatics PhD program at UIUC. The Information Sciences program has a priority deadline of October 20th, 2026; both programs have their regular application deadlines on December 1, 2026.