1. Human-AI Relationships:
Intimacy, self-expansion, and mutual shaping

• My first research line looks at human-AI intimacy across personal experience, platform discourse, and broader social change. I study how users build relationships with AI companions, how online communities make sense of these relationships, and why AI may become especially appealing when human relationships feel uncertain, demanding, or difficult to sustain.

• At the center of this work is a question about relational imagination: what kinds of companionship, love, and care become thinkable when AI enters intimate life? By connecting individual experiences with larger cultural conversations, I examine how AI companionship may reshape not only how people relate to machines, but also how they understand human relationships and themselves.

2. Virtual Influencer Marketing: 
Collaboration, advocacy, and human-virtual partnerships

• My second line of research explores how virtual influencers are changing the ways brands, organizations, and publics communicate. I study how these computer-generated personas gain social presence, build relationships with audiences, and become part of marketing, advocacy, and public-facing campaigns.

• A key focus of this work is collaboration. I examine how virtual influencers work with human influencers, brands, nonprofit organizations, and other digital actors, and how different forms of collaboration shape audience responses. These projects look at questions such as who should lead a collaboration, how visible human involvement should be, and when virtual influencers are seen as creative partners, strategic endorsers, or organizational voices.

3. Public Understanding of AI:
News, discussion, policy attitudes, and civic life

• My third research line examines how people learn about, interpret, and respond to AI technologies through news, public discussion, and everyday experience. I study how these encounters shape AI literacy, ethical concerns, policy attitudes, and civic engagement.

• This line of work highlights the role of communication in AI governance: public responses to AI are not formed only by technical knowledge, but also by the stories, conversations, and social contexts through which people encounter AI.