I am Tai-Quan “Winson” Peng, a Professor in the Department of Communication at Michigan State University, USA.

Over the course of my career, I have examined how different waves of communication technologies—starting with the internet and extending through social and mobile media to contemporary AI systems—change the ways people encounter information, form judgments, and engage with one another. Across these transitions, my work focuses on how evolving communication environments shape, and are shaped by, fundamental processes of attention, interpretation, and influence. This figure summarizes my long-term research program, tracing how my theoretical and methodological work has evolved across successive communication technology eras.

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A consistent theme in my scholarship is that emerging technologies do more than transform communication practices: they also offer new windows into human cognition and behavior. By engaging each technological shift as both an object of inquiry and a source of analytic innovation, I connect enduring and emerging theoretical questions in communication with the empirical possibilities opened by new forms of data, interaction, and representation. This approach has guided my work across areas such as computational social science, health communication, audience behavior, and political communication.

Currently, I serve as the Editor-in-Chief of Human Communication Research (2025 -) and previoiusly served as Associate Editor for the Journal of Communication (2022 - 2024). I have also co-edited special issues for Communication Methods and Measures (van Atteveldt & Peng, 2018), Asian Journal of Communication (Peng et al., 2019), and the Journal of Communication (Peng & Wang, 2026).

My research outputs have appeared in top-ranked journals of communication science, information science, public health, and computer science, such as Communication Methods and Measures, Digital Journalism, Communication Research, Human Communication Research, The International Journal of Press/Politics, New Media & Society, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Journal of Informetrics, JASIST, Scientometrics, AIDS Care, International Journal of Medical Informatics, Journal of Medical Internet Research, ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology, EPJ Data Science, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, and elsewhere. My research has received funding support from the National Science Foundation and Microsoft in the United States, the Academic Research Fund and National Research Foundation in Singapore, the Macao Foundation in Macao, and the General Research Fund in Hong Kong.