Yibing Sun is an assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Media at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research examines how visual media and artificial intelligence shape communication in contemporary digital environments. She studies how multimodal content is produced, circulated, and interpreted, with particular attention to visual persuasion, visual politics, and the ways emerging technologies influence the ways people encounter and engage with information.
Her research brings together two interconnected areas. The first investigates visual meaning-making at both the societal and individual levels, from the circulation of images across media platforms to the persuasive effects of visual messages on audiences. The second examines AI as both a communication actor and a research method. This work explores how multimodal large language models can be used to analyze complex media content, as well as how AI-generated multimodal messages shape attitudes, perceptions, and public discourse. Sun uses computational methods, experiments, and AI-assisted approaches to study communication across platforms and contexts.
Yibing earned her Ph.D. and M.A. in Mass Communication, with a minor in Educational Psychology, from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She received her B.A. in Broadcasting from Tongji University.
