Sijia Yang is an assistant professor at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research applies experimental, computational (e.g., multimodal automated content analysis, web-based experiments, causal machine learning), and community-engaged approaches to the study of message effects and persuasion on digital media, particularly in the context of public health and science communication.
Currently, he is pursuing three lines of research. The first line of work aims to understand the process of moralization and politicization of health issues and the implications for communication-based health interventions. Since multimodal content is now a norm in digital communication campaigns, the second line aims to identify and evaluate persuasive features in multimodal messages through causal machine learning. The last line of work aims to understand the roles of AI in pro-social persuasive messaging, especially the potential to harness the power of AI to improve health communication interventions in underserved communities.
Sijia received his Ph.D. in communication from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania in 2019, his M.A. in communication from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2012, and his B.A. in English language and literature from the Renmin University of China in 2010.