Siyu Liang

Siyu Liang joins the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) as Stanford Next Asia Policy Lab (SNAPL) Postdoctoral Fellow, 2026-2028. She recently obtained her PhD in Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Her research lies at the intersection of political communication, public opinion, and computational social science, with a focus on how media and information environments shape political attitudes in both democratic and authoritarian contexts.

Her dissertation examines the role of media in shaping perceptions of China in contemporary U.S.–China relations. In particular, she studies foreign influencer propaganda and the downstream effects of U.S.–China competition on public opinion and intergroup relations. As a computational social scientist, she develops and applies natural language processing and machine learning methods to study political communication and international politics, with particular interests in stance detection, transfer learning, and soft-label modeling.

At the Stanford Next Asia Policy Lab, she will expand this research agenda by examining how digital media and geopolitical conflict shape public opinion and social exclusion, with a particular focus on U.S.–Asia relations. She will also pursue projects on nationalism and racism in East Asia. Together, these projects seek to advance a more global understanding of how international politics shapes social inclusion and group relations across the Asia-Pacific region.

Siyu received master's degrees in Statistics and Political Science from UCLA and holds BA degrees in Political Science and Statistics from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.