Prateekshit "Kanu" Pandey, Ph.D.

Prateekshit “Kanu” Pandey studies the role of humor and satire in democratic participation, news sharing, and individual political agency in democratic contexts, with focus on the United States and South Asian countries. Kanu uses a combination of quantitative experimentational techniques to investigate the psychological mechanisms underlying media effects on democratic citizenry.

Prateekshit (pruh-TEEK-shit), who also goes by Kanu (kuh-noo), is a postdoctoral fellow at the Annenberg School, where he also completed his Ph.D. in the Summer of 2022. He currently holds joint appointments between the Communication Neuroscience Lab, and the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication. His active research program uses computational methods (e.g. network analysis), survey experiments, and neuroimaging techniques to investigate the effects of political entertainment, especially humor and satire, on democratic participation, news sharing, and individual political agency, with comparative focus between the United States and South Asian contexts. On various aspects of this program, he has led and collaborated on several online experimental surveys and neuropsychological studies with fluency in advanced computational analyses (R, Python), as well as peer-reviewed publications in broad interest journals including Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences, and field-specific journals such as Journal of Communication, International Journal of Communication, and Health Psychology. Complementing his academic work on humor, Kanu is also a professional improvisational comedian at Comedy Sportz Philadelphia and a teaching artist for applied improvisational techniques.