Zoë Natalia Cullen | PhD Student

about me.

I'm a PhD candidate at the University of Michigan in the School of Information, studying AI-mediated Communication & human-AI interaction. I'm advised by Dr. Nicole Ellison. I am on the academic job market this year.

I research how AI systems mediate communication and social perception in digital environments. I focus on the social and psychological implications of using AI to understand ourselves, interpret others, make decisions, and navigate interpersonal relationships, in contexts ranging from personal relationships to public discourse to organizational settings.

I combine experiments, in-depth interviews, and observational data to build theory about how people experience AI systems, how they interact with them in practice, and how those experiences and interactions shape one another.