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.

My research interests revolve around understanding the antecedents, structure, and consequences of political attitudes toward health, environment, science, and emerging technologies. I am particularly interested in how political identities, information environments, and interactions with AI technologies shape public opinion, trust, and decision-making. My methodological toolkit includes survey and field experiments, computational text analysis, and large language model–based methods.

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

  • What psychological, social, and informational factors shape people’s attitudes toward health, environment, science, and emerging technologies?
  • How does communication influence trust, judgment, and decision-making about scientific and technological issues?
  • How do AI systems and human–AI interactions shape public opinion and communication, and how valid are AI-based methods for studying human attitudes and behavior?

My first-authored research has appeared in interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journals including AI & Ethics, Climatic Change, Health Psychology, and Journal of Medical Internet Research. My research has received support from various institutions, including the National Science Foundation, the LSU Institute for Energy Innovation, the Rapoport Family Foundation, and the Stanford Institute for Research in the Social Sciences (IRiSS).

I received my Ph.D. in Communication from Stanford University in 2024, where I also earned a Master’s degree in Political Science. Additionally, I hold a Master’s degree from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University and a Bachelor of Arts with Honors from the School of Communication at Hong Kong Baptist University.