Zhe Xu

I am a research associate and Walter Benjamin fellow in the Department of Media and Communication at LMU Munich, affiliated with the chairs of Prof. Dr. Thomas Hanitzsch and Prof. Dr. Neil Thurman, where I serve as PI of a German Research Foundation (DFG) research project. I also serve as a research fellow at the Public Tech Media Lab at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

I hold degrees in engineering science and media studies and received my PhD in 2023 from the University of Cologne. While there, I served as an associate lecturer in media studies and received training in natural language processing and machine learning from the Center for Data and Simulation Science and the Department of Digital Humanities. I was also a visiting scholar at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).

I work in media ethics, computational journalism, and computational social science, answering questions about: (1) how information ecosystems shape public perceptions and decision-making around humanitarian issues; (2) how emerging technologies, including virtual reality, algorithms, and artificial intelligence, are transforming journalism and media institutions; and (3) how computational methods, including unsupervised clustering, semantic embeddings, and multimodal large language models, can be developed, validated, and theoretically grounded for communication research. My work has appeared in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, International Communication Gazette, and International Journal of Communication, among other peer-reviewed journals. The DFG, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and LMU Munich have supported my work.