Su Jung Kim is an associate professor at USC Annenberg. She is interested in how audience behavior takes shape in the digital media environment, especially the formation, patterns, and impacts of audience engagement in the digital media environment. Her research has examined cross-platform media repertoires and information-sharing behaviors (e.g., eWOM, online reviews, and news sharing), as well as the persuasive effects of audience engagement, for example, technology adoption, purchase decisions, and civic/political participation. Methodologically, she employs the tools of computational social science to trace, collect, and analyze individuals’ digital footprints along with other quantitative research methods. She is also the co-founder of the Computational Advertising Knowledge Exchange (CAKE) group, a community of scholars and practitioners interested in applying computational approaches to advertising research.

Her work has been published in top-tier peer-reviewed journals such as New Media & Society, Journal of Advertising, Journal of Interactive Marketing, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Digital Journalism, Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, Decision Support Systems, and International Journal of Communication, among others. At USC Annenberg, she teaches “Strategic Public Relations Research, Analysis and Insights” and “Strategic Public Relations: An Introduction.”

Prior to joining USC, she was an assistant professor at the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication at Iowa State University. Before that, she was a post-doctoral research associate in the Spiegel Research Center at the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University. She earned her PhD in media, technology, and society (MTS) from the School of Communication at Northwestern University. She double-majored in linguistics and communication and has an MA in communication from Seoul National University.

Outside academia, she is a licensed Zumba® instructor and believes that dancing makes everything better.

Awards and honors:

USC Annenberg Faculty Research Fund (2021)
AAA Research Fellowship Grant, American Academy of Advertising (2020)
NATPE Faculty Fellow, National Association of Television Program Executives (2018)
Best Paper Award, Journal of Interactive Marketing (2016)
Top Faculty Paper Award, Gene Burd Competition, Communication and Technology Division, Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (2016)