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 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, Health Psychology and Journal of Medical Internet Research. My research has received support from various institutions, including 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.