Zhe Xu

I am a Walter Benjamin postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Media and Communication at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, working with Prof. Dr. Thomas Hanitzsch and Prof. Dr. Neil Thurman. I am serving as a research fellow at the Public Tech Media Lab at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

I work in political and humanitarian communication and computational social science. Using natural language processing, survey experiments, among other methods, on diverse datasets, including large-scale political activity data and longitudinal multimodal news data, I study how emerging technologies and political elites shape information environments around humanitarian issues and how public attitudes and behaviors respond as a result.

I hold degrees in engineering science and media studies and received my PhD in 2023 from the University of Cologne under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Martin Scott. While there, I served as a research and teaching assistant in media studies and received training in data science and machine learning from the Center for Data and Simulation Science (CDS) and the Department of Digital Humanities (IDH). I was also a visiting scholar at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), hosted by Prof. Lilie Chouliaraki.

My research has been funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the British Academy, and the Faculty of Social Sciences at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.