Prof Zhu named an ICA fellow

Professor Jonathan Zhu has been named a fellow by the International Communication Association (ICA) at its annual conference held in Prague, Czech Republic, on May 26, 2018. An ICA fellow status is in recognition of distinguished scholarly contributions to the broad field of communication.

The 2018 ICA Fellows Program noted: “In his nearly three-decade career, Dr Zhu has made significant scholarly contributions to political communication research, new media studies and computational communication research. He has proposed many original and influential concepts, theories, and models in different domains of communication research, such as zero-sum game theory in agenda-setting research (Zhu, 1993), weighted needs of new media in diffusion of innovation (Zhu & He, 2002), and tea-pot model in hyperlink analysis (Zhu et al., 2008). He was among the few communication scholars who employed sophisticated time series modeling to unravel the capacity, diversity and volatility of public agenda (McCombs & Zhu, 1995) and account for the formation of public issue priority (Zhu et al., 1993). Since 2005, Dr Zhu has started incorporating computational thinking and methods in his research. His commitment and achievement in computational research has earned him recognition as an international leader in the emerging field of computational social science.”

The program added: “Dr Zhu has trained 10 PhD students with a specialty in computational social science, who are now working as university faculty members or web data scientists in Hong Kong, mainland China, the Middle East and the United States of America. They account for a significant share of the first generation of computational communication scholars around the world.”