Dr. Lewen Wei is Lecturer in the School of the Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales, Sydney since April, 2023. Her broad program of research is motivated by ever-changing technological innovations and their persuasive influence over people’s cognition, emotion, and behavior.  In particular, she is interested in how both immediate and temporal effects of message attributes (format, content, source) can be amplified by media technologies (e.g., social network sites, game and gamification, wearable trackers, chatbots, AI) to cultivate sustainable self-identities and relationships, build resilient communities, and facilitate responsible communication among different entities to collectively promote prosocial changes across individual, community, and society levels.

Lewen is familiar with quantitative, qualitative, computational, and design methodologies, and proficient at toolkits for data analytics, game design, and multimedia. She has worked independently or in collaboration with colleagues on a variety of research projects in the interconnected research areas including digital advertising/marketing, corporate social responsibility, crisis communication, and human-technology interaction. Her work has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Journal of Interactive Advertising, Public Relations Review, and Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, and conference proceedings in areas such as information systems and human-agent interaction, among others.

She held a bachelor degree in Editing and Publishing with a minor in Computer Science and Technology (Wuhan University, China, 2015), a master degree in Media Studies (Pennsylvania State University, USA, 2017), and a doctoral degree in Mass Communications with a minor in Social Data Analytics (Pennsylvania State University, USA, 2021). After that, Lewen was a postdoctoral research fellow of the Gamification Group in the Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences at Tampere University, Finland prior to joining UNSW.

Lewen is available to supervise Honours, Masters, and PhD students in her areas of expertise. Please feel free to reach out if you are interested in a project in the general area of technology-mediated strategic communication.