Research Team

James W. Pennebaker is the Regents Centennial Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. He and his students are exploring natural language use, group dynamics, and personality in real world settings. His earlier work on expressive writing found that physical health and work performance can improve by simple writing exercises. His cross-disciplinary research is related to linguistics, clinical and cognitive psychology, communications, medicine, and computer science. Author or editor of 9 books and over 250 articles, Pennebaker has received numerous awards and honors. Twitter: @jwpennebaker; Email: pennebaker@mail.utexas.edu 

Ashwini Ashokkumar is a senior graduate student in social psychology in the Department of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. She studies how people’s connections with others in social groups and communities evolve over time, and how they are disrupted by threatening events and upheavals. She takes a multi-method approach in pursuing these questions, complementing traditional social psychology methods with big data and language analysis methods. Twitter: @Ashuashok; Email: ashwinia@utexas.edu

Rada Mihalcea is the Janice M. Jenkins Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan and the Director of the Michigan Artificial Intelligence Lab. Her research interests are in natural language processing, with much of her recent work being around developing methods to facilitate an understanding of people’s beliefs, opinions, and behaviors from their language use. Her recent studies have uncovered new insights into perceptions of social roles, value systems across cultures, word use differences between groups, mental health, life outlook, and more. She is the recipient of a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers awarded by President Obama (2009), and currently serves as the Vice-President of the Association for Computational Linguistics.Twitter: @radamihalcea; Email: mihalcea@umich.edu

Steven Wilson is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. His research focuses on the development and application of natural language processing tools for learning about people based on what they write on social media and in free response surveys. He has used computational methods to study how language use is related to phenomena such as personal values, everyday activities, optimism, mental health, cultural background, and population size. He holds a PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Michigan. Twitter: @SteveWilsonNLP; Email: stevenrichardwilson@gmail.com

Laura Biester is a PhD student working on Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computational Social Science at the University of Michigan with Rada Mihalcea. She earned her bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Carleton College in 2016. She is interested in gaining a better understanding of people and society through language. In particular, she is interested in applying NLP methods to gain a better understanding of changes in mental health. Email: lbiester@umich.edu

Yiting Shen is a Natural Language Processing (NLP) research assistant in the Language and Information Technologies Lab (supervised by Rada Mihalcea) at the University of Michigan. He received his bachelor’s degree in Psychology, Computer Science and Data Science and his master’s degree in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Michigan. His research interest is in the field of Computational Social Science (CSS). His recent research work involves measuring personal values in cross-cultural user-generated content. Twitter: @YitingShenNLP; Email: yiting@umich.edu