The University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public has added two new postdoctoral scholars starting for the fall academic quarter, Mert Can Bayar and Yiwei Xu.
Bayar, based at the UW Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering, is joining the CIP from Binghamton University’s Political Science Department. He studies public opinion and democracy, focusing on conspiracy theories and evolving attitudes on democracy and autocracy. Bayar’s research sits in an interdisciplinary space between political psychology and comparative political behavior with an emphasis on the politics of conspiracy theories and the competing understandings of democratic citizenship. Bayar will be focusing primarily on the CIP’s rapid-response research in the elections space.
Xu, based at the UW Information School, joins the CIP from Cornell University’s Department of Communication. Her work examines and develops theory-driven communication strategies that address persistent and emergent public health challenges, including racial disparities, vaccine hesitancy, misinformation, and gun violence, with the goal of promoting policy change and health equity. She also researches collective level phenomena in health communication. She conducts experiments, surveys, and content analysis by incorporating computational methods. At the CIP, Xu will be focusing on addressing problems of misinformation and disinformation primarily in the areas of health and wellbeing.
