Hi!
I am a doctoral candidate in the Department of Communication at Michigan State University. I am affiliated with the Center for Avatar Research and Immersive Social Media Applications (CARISMA) Lab. Previously, I received my B.S. in Economics from the Wharton School of Business at UPenn, with a concentration in Marketing. I worked as a data analyst at a marketing research company for four years before deciding to pursue academic research.
Broadly speaking, I study how I use theories from psychology, communication, and human-computer interaction to study how AI-driven agents build relationships with people and influence the way they think, feel, and behave (i.e., artificial social influence). My current work Specifically, I study how the verbal and nonverbal communication processes and other factors affect psychological, relational, and behavioral outcomes of the human-AI social interaction (e.g., Lim et al., 2024). I was nominated for Google PhD Fellowship for this work.
My second research area involves designing emerging technology-based interventions for specific communities and topics. For example, I recently completed a year long project about designing immersive virtual reality (VR) and social robot well-being support tools for an Asian young adult community. This work was funded by the Strosacker Research Grant. Other examples include using generative AI to develop informative and persuasive health messages (Lim & Schmälzle, 2023; Lim & Schmälzle, 2024).
Lastly, I use immersive VR, combined with biobehavioral and psychophysiological measures, to examine psychological and communication processes in simulated real-life scenarios. (e.g., Lim et al., 2024).
See more detailed description of my projects here. Abstracts and links to my publications are here.