Eileen Han, PhD
Postdoctoral Scholar
Medicine
School of Medicine

Eileen Le Han is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at UCSF. She is interested in using tobacco industry documents and social media to study the marketing strategies of tobacco products, old and new. She is also interested in looking at using different types of authorities and expertise in shaping the scientific discourse about tobacco-related products and health issues.

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Recently, she is looking at the impact of misinformation about tobacco-related products and policies and the inequitable access to information on Asian Americans.

She received her PhD in Communication from the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. During and after her PhD studies, she mainly conducted qualitative research about social media, with a focus on collective memory and social activism. She published a book about social media and collective memory in China, which was an expansion of her dissertation research. Since then, she has been expanding her research to look at social media in many other contexts, including health and medicine, in which she is primarily interested in the use and understanding of expertise and authority in the digital age. She also received a MS degree in Information from the University of Michigan, where she had trainings in library science.

Awards

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  • Postdoctoral Fellowship Award, Tobacco-Related Disease Research Program (TRDRP), 2023-2025
  • Gene Burd Outstanding Dissertation in Journalism Studies Award (runner-up), International Communication Association, 2016

Education & Training

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  • MS Information University of Michigan 08/2021
  • PhD Communication University of Pennsylvania 05/2014

Interests

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  • Asian Americans
  • tobacco industry marketing strategies
  • health disparities
  • tobacco industry documents
  • social media
  • text mining

Publications (9)

Top publication keywords:
Natural Language ProcessingEmotionsImmunity, HerdSocial MediaHumansTrustPandemicsVaccination

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  • Weibo and the making of Chinese networked publics: Witness, debates and expertise
    Communication and the Public 2018 Eileen Le Han
  • Slogans and Slurs, Misogyny and Nationalism: A Case Study of Anti-Japanese Sentiment by Chinese Netizens in Contentious Social Media Comments
    International Journal of Communication 2018 Jason Q Ng, Eileen Le Han
  • Micro-blogging memories: Weibo and collective remembering in contemporary China
    Micro-blogging memories: Weibo and collective remembering in contemporary China 2016 Eileen Le Han
  • “Lucky cloud” over the world: The journalistic discourse of nationalism beyond China in the Beijing Olympics global torch relay
    Critical Studies in Media Communication 2011 Le Han