Alternative Text Welcome to my home page! My name is Catherine Chen; I am an Assistant Professor in Political Communication at both the Manship School of Mass Communication and the Department of Political Science at Louisiana State University. I am also honored to be appointed to the prestigious Mary P. Poindexter Endowed Professorship. I received my Ph.D. in Communication at Stanford University in 2024.

My research interests revolve around understanding the antecedents, structure, and consequences of political attitudes among Americans. Specifically, my work focuses on examining people’s attitudes toward science and technologies. My methodological toolkit encompasses a range of techniques, including surveys, lab and field experiments, quasi-experiments, and automated text analysis with Large Language Models.

Within this framework, I have been pursuing three interconnected research questions.

  • What are the origins, underlying structure, and implications of Americans’ attitudes toward Science, Health, Environment, and Risk (SHER)?
  • What are the factors that contribute to the partisan divide in attitudes toward SHER in the United States, and how to bridge this gap?
  • How do human and machine/AI interactions influence the perception and communication of scientific knowledge?

My research findings have been disseminated through prestigious peer-reviewed journals such as Climate Change and Health Psychology. My research has received support from various institutions, including the Stanford Center for Democracy (SCAD), the Stanford Institute for Research in the Social Sciences (IRiSS), and the Rapoport Family Foundation. I have been honored to hold positions such as the Melville J. Jacoby Fellow and the SAP Fellow under the Stanford Graduate Fellowship. I was a Doctoral Dissertation Fellow at IRiSS.

Outside academia, I have worked as a journalism intern at the Agence France-Presse (AFP) and a public relations intern at Sina Corps. I was born and raised in Dalian, China and spent some time in both Hong Kong and Australia. I am a cat lover and also find joy in exploring nature!