How I got here.

I grew up in Luoyang, China, a city I still associate with its peonies, the Longmen Grottoes, and its long history. I began college studying public relations and advertising in Zhuhai. In 2014, I moved to the United States and transferred to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where I studied communication and sociology alongside psychology. I stayed for an MA in Communication, then moved to UC Santa Barbara for my PhD, working with Ron Rice. In 2026, I joined the School of Communication, Film, and Media Studies at the University of Cincinnati.

Moving between languages, disciplines, and institutions made me attentive to what people assume everyone already knows. That path still shows up in the questions I ask. My research follows how people negotiate expertise and coordinate work as technologies and organizational forms change. I study legal professionals assessing AI, researchers collaborating across disciplines, and esports content teams working in public. These projects have drawn me to observation, interviews, documents, surveys, experiments, and network analysis, depending on the question.

I bring the same curiosity to teaching. Having been a first-generation student, I try to make the expectations of an assignment or a field clear enough for students to question them. In my classes, students use theory to examine organizations they know, discuss where an idea falls short, and build arguments of their own.