S. Shyam Sundar

Shyam Sundar (PhD, Stanford University) is Evan Pugh University Professor, James P. Jimirro Professor of Media Effects, and Director of the Center for Socially Responsible Artificial Intelligence CSRAI (opens in a new tab) at Penn State University. He is also the founding director of the Media Effects Research Laboratory at Penn State’s College of Communications. Prof. Sundar is a theorist as well as an experimentalist who uses a variety of quantitative and qualitative approaches in his research. His research examines social and psychological effects of interactive media, ranging from websites and social media to virtual assistants and virtual environments. Specifically, his experiments investigate the role played by technological affordances in shaping user experience of mediated communications. Current research pertains to psychological effects of Human-AI interaction in a variety of contexts, ranging from personalization and recommendation to fake news and content moderation.