From left, UW Information School associate professor Jin Ha Lee, Jackson School of International Studies associate professor Scott Radnitz and Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering assistant professor Amy X. Zhang.
The University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public has announced three new faculty appointments, bolstering the multidisciplinary research center’s existing group of faculty and research fellows.
The new CIP faculty — Jin Ha Lee of the UW Information School, Scott Radnitz of UW’s Jackson School of International Studies, and Amy X. Zhang of UW’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering — are appointed for two-year terms, with eligibility to renew their affiliations. They will have the opportunity to engage with the center’s full range of research and activities, including pursuing collaborative research proposals and projects, participating in the CIP’s Invited Speaker Series, utilizing the center’s research infrastructure, and applying for the CIP Innovation Fund.
Jin Ha Lee is an iSchool associate professor and the founder and director of the GAMER (GAME Research) Group. Her research focuses on exploring new ideas and approaches for organizing and providing access to popular music, multimedia, and interactive media, understanding user behavior related to the creation and consumption of these media, and using these media for informal learning. Recently, her work has focused on using popular media such as escape rooms to help improve the general public’s understanding of misinformation, and investigating how people encounter and develop strategies for combating misinformation in the context of fandom.
Scott Radnitz is the Herbert J. Ellison Associate Professor of Russian and Eurasian Studies in the Jackson School of International Studies, where his research primarily examines post-Soviet politics, specializing in topics such as authoritarianism, propaganda, informal politics, and identity. His forthcoming book is Revealing Schemes: The Politics of Conspiracy in Russia and the Post-Soviet Region (Oxford University Press, 2021). His public commentary has appeared in outlets such as Foreign Policy, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Slate, and the National Interest.
Amy X. Zhang is an assistant professor at the Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering and leads the Social Futures Lab, dedicated to reimagining social and collaborative systems to empower people and improve society. Previously, she was a 2019-20 postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University’s Computer Science Department after completing her Ph.D. at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 2019, where she received the George Sprowls Best Ph.D. Thesis Award at MIT in computer science. During her Ph.D., she was an affiliate and 2018-19 fellow at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University, a Google Ph.D. fellow, and an NSF graduate research fellow. Her work has received two best paper awards at ACM CSCW, a best paper honorable mention award at ACM CHI, and has been profiled on BBC’s Click television program, CBC Radio, and featured in articles by ABC News, The Verge, New Scientist, and Poynter. She is a founding member of the Credibility Coalition, a group dedicated to research and standards for information credibility online. She has interned at Microsoft Research and Google Research.
Beyond the CIP’s five principal investigators and cofounders, the CIP’s other faculty members, appointed in 2020, are UW Department of Biology professor Carl Bergstrom, School of Law professor Mary Fan, iSchool assistant professor Tanu Mitra, and Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering associate professor Franziska Roesner. In 2020, Jason Young, a senior research scientist at the iSchool’s Technology & Social Change Group, was appointed as a CIP research fellow.
Learn more about the CIP’s principal investigators, faculty, research fellows, postdoctoral scholars, and professional staff members.
