Su Jung Kim

Su Jung Kim is an Associate Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. She is also the Co-Founder of the CAKE (Computational Advertising Knowledge Exchange) group, a community of scholars and practitioners interested in applying computational approaches to advertising research.

She is interested in how audience behavior takes shape in the digital media environment, especially the formation, patterns, and impacts of audience engagement. Her research has examined cross-platform media repertoires and information sharing behaviors (e.g., eWOM, online reviews, and news sharing), as well as the persuasive effects of audience engagement, for example, technology adoption, purchase decisions, and civic/political participation.

Methodologically, she employs the tools of computational social science to trace, collect and analyze individuals’ digital footprints along with other quantitative research methods. Her work has been published in top-tier peer-reviewed journals such as New Media & Society, Journal of Advertising, International Journal of Advertising, Journal of Interactive Marketing, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Digital Journalism, Computers in Human Behavior, and Decision Support Systems, among others.

Prior to joining USC, she was Assistant Professor in the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication at Iowa State University. Before that, she was Post-Doctoral Research Associate in the Spiegel Research Center in the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University. She earned her PhD in Media, Technology and Society (MTS) from the School of Communication at Northwestern University. She double-majored in Linguistics and Communication and has an MA in Communication from Seoul National University.