Dr. Jiaying Liu

Jiaying Liu (Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Georgia. Her primary research interest lies at the intersection of health communication, social psychology, message effects, and computational social science methods. She is particularly interested in understanding the factors and the underlying processes that lead to risky health decision making, and how communications could be optimally leveraged to promote desirable health behavior changes. Her recent research projects include conducting longitudinal analysis on nationally representative survey data to identify factors that predispose youth and young adults to cigarette and e-cigarette use; implementing online and eye-tracking experiments to identify persuasive message features and inform campaign formative evaluation; combining crowdsourcing and machine-based content analysis to automatically annotate large media text corpora; and employing neuroimaging methods to examine the underlying mechanisms of successful and counterproductive communication.

Dr. Liu is routinely involved in highly collaborative, interdisciplinary work. Dr. Liu’s research has been published in major Communication, Public Health and Psychology journals including Journal of Communication, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Communication Methods and Measures, Health Communication, Journal of Health Communication, American Journal of Preventive Medicine, and Psychological Bulletin.

Her research was recently featured on UGA's Office of Research! See it here. 

She recently received Career Award from National Institutes of Health! See it here.