Jiaqi (Agnes) Bao

Jiaqi (Agnes) Bao hails from a coastal city in southeastern China. She earned her master's degree in journalism, specializing in multimedia reporting, from Michigan State University in 2019. Prior to that, she completed a bachelor’s degree in communication with a focus on multimedia production.

After completing her graduate studies, Jiaqi (Agnes) Bao relocated to Los Angeles to begin her career in the news industry, where she gained broad experience across print, broadcast, radio, digital journalism, and strategic content marketing. During her two-year professional journey, she focused on amplifying the voices of Chinese immigrants in the local community.

Her career coincided with the outbreak of COVID-19, providing valuable insights into how media shaped online discourse and influenced people’s attitudinal and behavioral changes. Through indirect observation of online behavioral data, she gained a deeper understanding of media effects. This experience reinforced the idea that effective communication requires both an understanding of psychological mechanisms and strategic planning in media production.

This experience has profoundly shaped her research agenda, which intersects strategic communication, media effects, and human-computer interaction, especially in the contexts of health and advertising. She employs quantitative research methods, including experiments and surveys. Her primary research goal is to explore how emerging media influences communication outcomes and to identify the strategic techniques driving these effects. This focus extends to both media and message-related variables, such as information modalities and technological affordances, and psychological variables like emotional responses.