Zoë Natalia Cullen | PhD Student

about me.

I'm a PhD candidate at the University of Michigan in the School of Information, focusing on 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, and make decisions, 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.