Welcome! I am a PhD candidate in Political Science and an MS student in Statistics at the University of California, Los Angeles. I hold B.A degrees in Political Science and Statistics from University of Wisconsin-Madison.

My research interests are centered on computational social science and political communication, with a focus on examining media dynamics in shaping public opinion within both authoritarian and democratic countries. In my broader research agenda, I am interested in the Chinese transnational propaganda and the impact of U.S.-China relations on Asian Americans. Methodologically, I’m interested in text analysis and natural language processing, with a specific focus on stance detection. My dissertation includes a series of papers that explore media influence on the perception of China, investigating perspectives both within China and the United States.

My work has been conditionally accepted or published in Comparative Political Studies, PLOS One and the ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD). Previously, I was a 2024–25 U.S.-Asia Grand Strategy Pre-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Southern California. My research has been supported by the Stand Together Trust, RFF Doctoral Dissertation Survey Research Grant, and UCLA Fellowship in Political Psychology.

I was born in Beijing, China. In my free time, I enjoy hot yoga, hiking, traveling, and exploring good restaurants and bars in the city.

You can contact me at sliang46@g.ucla.edu.

The latest copy of my CV is here