PACS news / August 29, 2020
PACS Postdoctoral Scholars Announced
Stanford PACS is pleased to welcome our incoming Postdoctoral Scholars for the 2020-21 academic year: Samantha Bradshaw, James Chu, Soojong Kim, and Ashley Lee.
Dr. Bradshaw received her Ph.D. from the Oxford Internet Institute where she studied the producers and drivers of computational propaganda. Her fellowship research will examine the gender dimensions of disinformation, and how harassment and misogyny are used to suppress the political participation of women. She will hold a joint appointment between PACS’s Digital Civil Society Lab and the Cyber Policy Center’s Internet Observatory.
Dr. James Chu’s research seeks to explain stratification and inequality from a social psychological and organizational perspective. One of his core interests is when and how status and reputation systems lead people into greater conflict and inequality. In July 2020, he successfully defended his dissertation which explored how the spread of ranking systems (such as those for colleges or hospitals) exacerbates social inequality and why certain ranking systems become dominant while others fall into obscurity. Chu will join PACS’s Polarization and Social Change Lab.
Dr. Lee joins the PACS’s Digital Civil Society Lab from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, with a background in both software engineering and human rights advocacy. Her current research examines how young activists across democratic and authoritarian countries incorporate social media tactics into their political repertoire, especially as they navigate state and corporate surveillance in the digital world.
Dr. Kim studies the mechanisms and consequences of social media disinformation and media manipulation. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School of Communication. His work attempts to build innovative tools that evaluate and monitor the social impacts of disinformation and bots. At Stanford, he will have a joint appointment between the Digital Civil Society Lab and the Program on Democracy and the Internet.