Yijing Chen, Ph.D.

Yijing Chen's research broadly centers on online political communication, political polarization, and belief systems, with the aim of examining how political divides are incorporated, exacerbated, or potentially bridged by the social structures embedded in contemporary sociotechnical systems.

Yijing Chen is a Vartan Gregorian Postdoctoral Fellow in the Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC) and the Annenberg School for Communication of the University of Pennsylvania. Her research broadly centers on online political communication, political polarization, and belief systems, with the aim of examining how political divides are incorporated, exacerbated, or potentially bridged by the social structures embedded in contemporary sociotechnical systems. Trained in network and information science, she’s interested in leveraging computational methods and large-scale data analysis to observe individual and collective dynamics of online political communication via a complex systems perspective. Before joining Penn, she completed a Ph.D. in Network Science at Central European University and an M.S. in Information Science at the University of Michigan.