MELODY CHEN
graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) in 2024 with two Bachelor of Arts degrees in Statistics & Data Science and Philosophy. In April, she gave a TEDx talk on the evolving history of distractions and social media.
Her research contribution centers around digital spaces and the consequences of such on democracy, including work with the Brookings Institution, where she was acknowledged for assisting with data analysis on reports about misinformation in American political podcasts and Russian state-backed propaganda in Latin America (the former topic was featured in The New York Times here and here). She co-authored a forthcoming research paper on media and partisan social sorting with Dr. Dan Lane in the Digital Political Inequality Lab at UCSB, which she presented last fall at the American Political Science Association (APSA) Annual Meeting in Philadelphia. Her undergraduate projects include a policy proposal on U.S. export controls on advanced computing semiconductors and a machine learning model for fake news detection, where she analyzed language and emotion patterns in headlines.
Additionally, she drafted talking points and reviewed literature on data disaggregation among the Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) community for the White House Initiative on AANHPI as an intern. She has also written in newsrooms for her hometown paper, Los Altos Town Crier, and college newspaper, The Daily Nexus. She also enjoys writing philosophy and creative prose in her Substack newsletter.