Zhe Xu

I am a Walter Benjamin Fellow in the Department of Media and Communication at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, working with Prof. Dr. Thomas Hanitzsch and Prof. Dr. Neil Thurman.

I work in crisis communication and computational social science, with a particular focus on humanitarian crises. My current research agenda centers on two strands. (1) Using natural language processing and large language models on news corpora and digital trace data, I study how information mediates humanitarian crises and how public behavior is shaped as a result. (2) I am also interested in the platformization of humanitarian crises, with a focus on the applications and ethical implications of AI and virtual reality in crisis communication.

I was a visiting scholar at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). I hold degrees in engineering science and media studies and received my PhD in 2023 from the University of Cologne under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Martin Scott. 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 (CDS) and the Department of Digital Humanities (IDH).