Mia Huiqian Lai is a Ph.D. student in Information Science and Technology at Syracuse University. Her research interests focus on the collective behavior of social media users within participatory cultures, with particular emphasis on understanding the emergence and evolution of social norms. Drawing from computational social science and natural language processing methodologies, she wants to examine how digital communities form, interact, and establish shared cultural practices. Her advisor is Dr. Yiqi Li.
Mia earned her M.A. in Communication with distinction from Hong Kong Baptist University in 2024 and a B.Sc. in Software Engineering from Shandong Jianzhu University, mainland China in 2019. Before her doctoral studies, Mia had five years of industry experience as a Senior Software Development Engineer at leading IT companies in China, such as NetEase Games and Baidu.
Learn more about Mia’s work on her personal website, https://huiqianlai.github.io/, or connect with her on LinkedIn. For inquiries, please email her at hlai12@syr.edu.