Zhe Xu

I am a Walter Benjamin postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Media and Communication at LMU Munich, working with Prof. Dr. Thomas Hanitzsch and Prof. Dr. Neil Thurman. 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 a research and teaching assistant in media studies and received training in data science 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 study how emerging technologies and political elites shape information environments around crises and humanitarian issues, using computational modeling and other social scientific methods. My research has been supported by research and travel grants from the German Research Foundation (DFG), the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the German Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space, and the LMU Munich.