Emily K. McKinley

Project focus: The Fellow will address pressing questions facing civic science in a social-media-dominated world.

Emily McKinley is a computational social scientist whose research examines how emerging technologies, including social media and artificial intelligence (AI), influence human attitudes and behaviors, with particular attention to health and prosocial contexts. Alongside this work, she develops computational and AI-assisted methods for social science research that allow persuasion, health communication, and misinformation to be studied at scale. Emily earned her Ph.D. and M.A. in communication, with a designated emphasis in computational social science, from the University of California, Davis, and her B.A. in communication from Utah State University. Before entering academia, she worked in consumer research and customer experience at Cotopaxi, Maverik, and Gigi Pip.