Faculty

Fan Yang

Assistant Professor

contact

Office: CIS 3014C
Email

bio

Fan Yang is an assistant professor in The Zimmerman School of Advertising & Mass Communications and the founder of the Human and AI Research Lab at the University of South Florida. She earned her doctoral degree in communication from Pennsylvania State University in 2017, with a graduate minor in statistics. Dr. Yang's research interests center around emerging AI-powered communication technology, with a special focus on Human-AI interaction, digital justice, misinformation, and information literacy, using a wide range of research methods including interviews, surveys, experiments, meta-analytics, social network analysis, as well as text mining.

Funded by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Insight Development Grant and the Arthur W. Page Center for Integrity in Public Communications, Dr. Yang's scholarly work has been published in various peer-reviewed journals, including American Behavioral Scientist , Communication Research, Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, Information, Communication & Society, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, and New Media & Society.

Dr. Yang serves on the editorial boards for Mass Communication and Society and the Review of Communication Research. She also acts as an ad-hoc reveiwer for over 40 interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journals, professional organizations, and federal agencies like the National Science Foundation. Additionally, she served as the Head of the Mass Communicatin & Society Division of AEJMC, the historically largest division with more than 400 members worldwide. She is also a member of the Social Science Curriculum Committee at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Berkshire Community College, where she has offered a "Digital Literacy for Seniors" course as an Instructor of Record.

She enjoys teaching audiences analysis, media analytics, data storytelling, and just talking about data in general.

education

  • Ph.d., Communication, Pennsylvania State

teaching areas

  • Media analytics
  • Data storytelling

research specialization

  • Emerging AI-powered communication technology
  • Human-AI interaction
  • Digital justice, misinformation, and information literacy