Team Leadership

Our interdisciplinary team blends expertise in the following areas:

• Communication and public relations
• Computer science
• Political science
• Psychology

Lead Principal Investigator
Dr. Cherie Maestas, Director Public Policy Program, Marshall A. Rauch Distinguished Professor of Political Science, Department of Political Science and Public Administration, has served as a PI or Co-PI on multiple NSF and foundation grants in which she conducted both cross-sectional and panel survey research at the national level. Her research areas focus on the role of emotion and attitudes towards risk in shaping political attitudes and behavior. She has worked extensively with both graduate and undergraduate students on research and has served as a Director of Graduate Studies in two Ph.D. programs as well as served as Founding Director of an undergraduate research certificate program. At UNC Charlotte, she directs POLS-Lab, an interdisciplinary resource for running survey experiments that provides students and faculty with regular opportunities to collect pilot data and field full research studies. Her grant-funded research output has resulted in publicly available datasets and has been published in top ranked journals and presses in political science. In addition to bringing expertise in survey research and experimental design, she brings experience as a project leader on NSF-funded grants.

Co-Principal Investigator
Dr. Tiffany Gallicano, Associate  Professor in the Department of Communication Studies, specializes in public relations. She has authored/co-authored 20 refereed journal articles in the areas of relationship management, social media, ethics and pedagogy. She has won six awards for her scholarship. She is a past head and former social media chair of the PR Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. She has professional experience in nonprofit organizations, political campaigns and public relations agencies. She brings her expertise in qualitative methods to the team, as well as her background in social media, activism and ethics. She is co-leading the qualitative portion of the project, in addition to providing support for the other phases of the study.

Co-Principal Investigator
Dr. Sara M. Levens, Associate Professor in the Department of Psychological Science, studies emotion—specifically emotion processing, emotion regulation, and the association between emotion reactivity and behavior. She is co-leading the initial survey portion of the study, as well as the design of the stimuli for the experimental phase of the project. She also plays a leading role in upholding ethical standards in accordance with the study’s IRB approval and ensuring the quality of the data.

Co-Principal Investigator
Dr. Samira Shaikh, Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and in the Department of Psychological Science, specializes in natural language processing and artificial intelligence, specifically computational sociolinguistics. She has over a decade of experience in these fields and has published numerous publications in prestigious venues. She is co-leading the development and validation of computational models for the second stage of the project.

Co-Principal Investigator
Wlodek Zadrozny, Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science, focuses on applications of text analysis and natural language processing. He has substantial industry and academic experience in these domains. He is co-leading the development and validation of computational models.