Yuan Zhang

With an interest in the intersection of communication science and network science, Yuan Zhang’s research focuses on the structures and dynamics of information networks on social media and their use in interpreting online political uncivil behavior.

Yuan Zhang is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Communication Science and Media Research at the University of Zurich. She holds Master's degrees in Social Data Science from the Oxford Internet Institute and in Political Economy and Political Science from the London School of Economics. She is currently a visiting scholar at the Annenberg School for Communication, Center for Information Networks and Democracy (CIND).

Her research leverages computational methods and complex network analysis to investigate the fine-grained structures and dynamics of information networks on social media, with a primary focus on political discourse. In her dissertation, she examines the complexity of individuals’ political selective exposure and investigates the mechanisms driving the spread of political incivility on social media. Her work aims to integrate the analytical power of network modeling with the interpretative depth of communication theory.