2022-2023 Graduate Research Award Winner: Hyerim Jo

The Department of Communication has announced that Ph.D. student Hyerim Jo is the recipient of the 2022-2023 Graduate Student Research Award. 

The award is given every year by the faculty of the Department of Communication to a Ph.D. or M.A. student for excellence in academic research. Students may be recognized for published academic research, research presented at major academic conferences, fellowships and/or grants received, or any other significant scholarly accomplishments.
 
Hyerim was co-nominated by Professors Masa Yamamoto and Fan Yang. Hyerim was the first author on a publication at New Media and Society entitled Spreaders vs Victims: The Nuanced Relationship between Age and Misinformation via FoMO and Digital Literacy in Different Cultures. For this publication, Hyerim collaborated with Professor Yang in exploring how different age groups (young adults vs. seniors) react differently to misinformation on social media.  
 
In addition, Hyerim was second author on a publication with Dr. Yamamoto titled Anti-media expression by citizens: conservative summary sites, hostile media perceptions, and media trust in Japan at Information, Communication and Society. As part of the initial draft, she scraped text from a Japanese hyper-conservative site, preprocessed it, and extracted frequently occurring words to contextualize how reading the site could affect attitudes toward mainstream news outlets.    
 
The Graduate Student Research Award Committee evaluated Hyerim’s nomination based on the following criteria: (1) publications and presentations (quality, quantity and impact/prominence of journals/conferences), (2) coherence of research, (3) independence in research (selection of topics and conducting research), and (4) receipt of research grants and awards.

The 2022-2023 Graduate Student Research Award Selection Committee consisted of Professor Kenneth Levine (chair), Tim Stephen, and Hui-Ching Chang.