Gina Chen, Ph.D

Assistant Professor

Dr. Gina Masullo Chen, assistant professor, holds a doctorate in mass communication with a sub-focus in social psychology and a master’s in public communication from Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. She also has a bachelor’s in communication from Franciscan University of Steubenville in Ohio. Before entering academe, she spent 20 years as a newspaper and online reporter and editor with most of her professional experience at The Post-Standard in Syracuse, NY. Her research focuses on online engagement through social media and its darker side – computer-mediated aversive communication. She is particularly interested in how to foster reader engagement on news websites by understanding and taming the often-virulent online comments that can mar the user experience. Her research has been published in peer-reviewed journals, such as Mass Communication and Society, Newspaper Research Journal and Computers in Human Behavior. She regularly presents her work at national conferences of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, the International Communication Association and the National Communication Association. She blogs about the future of journalism at SavetheMedia.com and for Harvard University’s Nieman Journalism Lab: http://www.niemanlab.org/author/gchen/.