Welcome to my home page! My name is Yingdan Lu; I am an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies in the School of Communication at Northwestern University. I am the co-director of the Computational Multimodal Communication Lab, a core faculty in Northwestern's Media, Technology, and Society (MTS) and Technology and Social Behavior (TSB) PhD programs, and affiliated with the Center for Communication & Public Policy and Center for Human-Computer Interaction + Design.

My research focuses on digital technology, political communication, and information manipulation in authoritarian and democratic contexts, focusing on two areas: digital technologies and information manipulation in authoritarian politics, and multimodal communication in AI-mediated environments. My work has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Political Communication, New Media & Society, Human-Computer Interaction, International Journal of Press/Politics, and among other peer-reviewed journals.

As a computational social scientist, my past and ongoing research has focused on advancing computational methods through the development of new frameworks analyzing multimodal data such as images and videos, the extension of natural language processing methods to analyze cross-lingual digital communication, and the promotion of mixed-method research.

I received my Ph.D. in Communication at Stanford University in 2023, advised by Professor Jennifer Pan, where I also earned a Ph.D. minor in Political Science, and a M.A. degree from Center of East Asian Studies. I obtained my B.A. degree from the School of Journalism and Communication at Tsinghua University.

Latest Publications

• Lu, Y., Pan, J., Xu, X., & Xu, Y. (Conditionally accepted). Decentralized Propaganda in the Era of Digital Media: The Massive Presence of the Chinese State on Douyin. American Journal of Political Science
• Hanley, H. W., Lu, Y., & Pan, J. (2025). Across the firewall: Foreign media’s role in shaping Chinese social media narratives on the Russo-Ukrainian War. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 122(1)
• Lu, Y., & Peng, Y. (2024). The Mobilizing Power of Visual Media Across Stages of Social-Mediated Protests. Political Communication. 1-28.
• Qian, S., Lu, Y., Peng, Y., Shen, C., & Xu, H. (2024). Convergence or divergence? A cross-platform analysis of climate change visual categories, features, and user engagement on Twitter and Instagram. Public Relations Review. 50(2), 102454.