René is professor of communication at UCSB and principal researcher at the Media Neuroscience Lab. He has earned both a Ph.D. in Media Psychology and an M.D. in Psychiatry and Cognitive Neuroscience. As a cognitive neuroscientist and communication/media scholar, his research focuses on cognitive responses to content in traditional and new technology media. He develops social scientific, statistical, and neuroscientific methodology for the rigorous test of media related theories. He has published more than 120 journal articles and book chapters and has written 3 books. He is a Fellow of the International Communication Association and past chair of ICA’s Mass Communication Division and ICA’s Communication Science and Biology Interest Group.

Chelsea is a PhD student in the Department of Communication at UCSB. Her research interests include cognitive communication science and interactive media. Specifically, her research focuses on the relationship between cognitive sex differences, media usage, and media effects. She was awarded distinction in the major in Psychology for her research which examined how individual player differences such as spatial ability, and video game features including gender themes and spatial demands relate to female game preferences. Her research received third place at UCSB’s URCA annual colloquium in the Social Sciences category. Chelsea is an alumna of UCSB where she received a BA in both Communication and Psychology.

Frederic is a MA/PhD student in the Department of Communication at UCSB. Broadly speaking, his research explores media processes and effects from cognitive and neuroscientific perspectives. Specifically, his current research focuses on neural responses to morally-laden media content to predict real-world outcomes, such as media preferences or political judgment and decision making. Before attending UCSB, Frederic held several research assistant positions at the University of Mannheim, where he investigated the effects of cyberostracism in social media environments and the role of entertainment experiences for the processing of political talk shows. Frederic holds a BA in Media and Communication Studies with a minor in Political Science from the University of Mannheim.

Jacob is a graduate student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, a researcher in the Media Neuroscience Lab, and a trainee of the National Science Foundation IGERT in Network Science and Big Data. He researches multimedia processing and media multitasking from a network neuroscience perspective. His current work investigates how certain digital environments can modulate attentional networks in the brain, and how these modulatory effects can be harnessed to develop novel treatments for cognitive processing disorders like ADHD.

Layne is a graduate student in the Department of Communication at UCSB. He is broadly interested in examining the impacts of persuasive messages through the lens of cognitive neuroscience. His previous research has dipped into a wide variety of areas, but he is particularly interested in examining the impact of extremism in political messaging.

Yibei is a graduate student in the Department of Communication at the University of California, Santa Barbara, a researcher in the Media Neuroscience Lab. She is interested in all kinds of computational methods and combining those with neuroscience research. Currently, she works on how latent moral content predicts real-world behaviors and whether moral values could be used to predict communities in a network

“Musa is a researcher in the Media Neuroscience Lab at UCSB. He is passionate about the development of algorithmic tools that facilitate research in computational communication science. He is currently interested in exploring the relationships between content features extracted from global news-narratives and regional indicators that measure socio political phenomena such as inequality and conflict. Besides Python, R, and Javascript, Musa can fluently communicate in English, Urdu, and Hindi. He is intermediately proficient in Mandarin and hopes to master Polish in the coming years. Musa holds a BS in Neuroscience from New York University.”