Zhe Xu

I am a research associate and Walter Benjamin fellow in the Department of Media and Communication at LMU Munich, affiliated with the chairs of Prof. Dr. Thomas Hanitzsch and Prof. Dr. Neil Thurman, where I serve as PI of a German Research Foundation (DFG) research project. I also serve as a research fellow at the Public Tech Media Lab at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

I hold degrees in engineering science and media studies and received my PhD in 2023 from the University of Cologne. While there, I served as an associate lecturer in media studies and received training in natural language processing and machine learning from the Center for Data and Simulation Science and the Department of Digital Humanities. I was also a visiting scholar at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).

I work in political communication and computational social science. Using social and data science methods with multimodal data, I answer questions about how humanitarian information is politically, technologically, and algorithmically mediated, and the resulting effects on public behaviors. I also actively collaborate with computer and behavioural scientists, developing mixed-reality systems that enhance prosocial responses to humanitarian emergencies. My work has appeared in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, International Communication Gazette, and International Journal of Communication, among other peer-reviewed journals. The DFG, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and LMU Munich have supported my work.