Zening Duan

Bio

I’m Zening Duan (pronounced ZEH-ning DWAN), a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Computational Communication in the Department of Communications and New Media at the National University of Singapore. In 2026, I was awarded the NUS Presidential Young Professorship (PYP) in Computational Social Science. I am also affiliated with research communities including the NUS Artificial Intelligence Institute and the UW–Madison Public Tech Media Lab.

I study attention dynamics and information flows on digital platforms, with an emphasis on online political/moral discourse, social media algorithms, and media ecosystems. My work takes an interdisciplinary approach, engaging communication, media psychology, U.S. politics, and computational social science. One question that motivates my recent work is how Artificial Intelligence (AI) functions as a communicator, competing for public attention across social media, newsrooms, and conversational interfaces. Empirically, I focus on English- and Mandarin-speaking societies in Asia and North America, contexts I have lived in and worked with for years. Methodologically, I draw on both causal and descriptive approaches, using digital trace data, computational multimodal analysis, AI and algorithm auditing, online experiments, and surveys as the question requires.

My lead-authored and/or co-first authored work has appeared in prestigious peer-reviewed journals including Human Communication Research, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, New Media & Society, Political Analysis, and The International Journal of Press/Politics, among others. Much of this work has been supported by grants and awards from internal and external institutions such as the Holtz Center, WARF, and NUS-PYP. My research has also been cited in policy reports by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC).