Yingdan (Rita) Lu

I'm a PhD Candidate in Department of Communication at Stanford University. Working in a data-driven and analytical field, I've been experienced in conducting research and dealing with data analysis in multi-disciplinary fields of social sciences. My research focuses on digital media, political communication, and online information manipulation. I integrate large-scale data and computational methods into the pursuit of social scientific theory and analysis. My work has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including Political Communication, Human-Computer Interaction, and Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media. Methodologically, I employ various computational methods and massive multimedia datasets to facilitate my research. In particular, my research examines massive textual data such as social media posts and government documents through natural language processing and machine learning methods. I have also extended my research from text to visual data, for which I apply computer vision techniques and combine analysis of video, text, and meta-data to facilitate quantitative analysis on massive video datasets. Meanwhile, by combining the Screenomics approach and unsupervised machine learning, I can analyze media use through millions of moment-by-moment screenshots collected from mobile users in different contexts. Always appreciating the abilities of cross-cultural communication and fast-learning under different circumstances, I have been to China, Los Angeles and Tokyo as an field work researcher, research intern or visiting scholar. I have also given academic talks in U.S., Europe, Macau and mainland China. Besides conducting research, I also have the experience working in companies including Bayer China, Bloomberg Businessweek China, China News Agency and Ruder Finn Asia, dealing with issues related to journalism and public relations. I'm experienced in programming and markup languages like Python, R, Stata, SQL, and LATEX. I am a native speaker of Mandarin, and also able to speak Korean and Japanese. I love to make friends and hang out with people from different backgrounds. In my spare time, I am also a vocal of my own band, and a freelance writer, and looking forward to any possibility to enrich myself. For more information, check out my personal webpage: https://yingdanlu.com