Eileen Han, PhD

Eileen Han, PhD, received her doctorate in Communication from the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. During and after her PhD studies, she mainly conducted qualitative research about social media, with a focus on collective memory and social activism. She published a book about social media and collective memory in China, which was an expansion of her dissertation research. Since then, she has been expanding her research to look at social media in many other contexts, including health and medicine, in which she is primarily interested in the use and understanding of expertise and authority in the digital age. Her current research mainly focuses on the public discourses on social media about health issues, including how Twitter users talk about doctors and the medical community during the COVID-19 pandemic. This year, she has also received a MS degree in Information from the University of Michigan, where she had trainings in programming, data analysis, natural language processing and machine learning. 

Dr. Han is very excited to join the fellowship program at CTCRE, where she would like to combine her qualitative and computational skills to explore promising topics in the tobacco regulatory field. She will focus on how the public discussions on major social media platforms about new tobacco products and personal experiences could inform policymaking and regulation. She is also interested in looking at different types of authorities and expertise in this process. She would also like to study various forms of texts related to tobacco marketing and control.