News

Funding Awarded from Waterhouse Family Institute (WFI) 🎉

We are thrilled to announce that Dr. Jiaying Liu has been awarded the prestigious Waterhouse Family Institute (WFI) Grant for the Study of Communication and Society!

Collaborative Cannabis Research Wins R01 Funding 🎉

Exciting news — a Drug Policy Research collaboration among UC San Diego, The Ohio State University, and UCSB’s CHARM Lab has earned a major R01 grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse!

This $3M+ project will run from July 2025 to April 2030 and focus on enhancing health warning messages for recreational cannabis products in California, using experimental and eye-tracking methods. UCSD will serve as the the prime awardee, with UCSB as a key subaward site. Let's hear it for Jiaying and the whole team doing cutting-edge cannabis prevention work in California!

Yidi Wang Won Top Student Paper & Graduate Student Mentorship Award at NCA 🏆

🎉 Congratulations to our lab manager, Yidi Wang, for receiving the Top Student Paper Award in the Communication and Social Cognition Division at the 2025 National Communication Association (NCA) Conference! She also earned the Graduate Student Mentorship Award—we’re so proud of her achievements!

📑 CHARM Lab Paper Accepted at 111th NCA!

Exciting news! Congrats to Dr. Jiaying Liu and lab members on the recent acceptance of their paper for NCA 2025 in the Health Communication Division! It’s thrilling to know that our labs’ innovative research will be presented at this year’s conference. This work was a collaboration with the CNS Lab at UGA. 

🎤 New Conference Presentation Alert at NCA!

Our lab’s research has been accepted for presentation at the 111th Annual Convention of the National Communication Association (NCA) this November in Denver! Lab member Jessica (Tianlai) Ye, along with Dr. Jiaying Liu and collaborators Dr. Lawrence Sweet and Emily Norton from the CNS Lab at UGA, will present their interdisciplinary work at the conference.

📑 New Publication Alert！Click and Read!

A new paper from our lab member, Qiyao Peng has just been published in the Proceedings of the Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ’25)!  Qiyao, in collaboration with the CMMC Lab, examines how photorealistic AI-generated images shape perceptions of realism and their potential to mislead in the paper titled: "Crafting Synthetic Realities: Examining Visual Realism and Misinformation Potential of Photorealistic AI-Generated

CHARM Lab Delivers Eye-Tracking Training Workshop at GSU for NIH R01 Project 👀

We are excited to share that a collaborative NIH R01 project, funded by the National Cancer Institute and the FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products, has been awarded to Georgia State University (GSU) as the primary site, with Dr. Jiaying Liu serving as Co-Investigator and UCSB as the other data collection site. 

🍕 Lab Meeting Highlights: Research Progress and Pizza!!

Today in our lab meeting, our undergraduate RAs shared updates on their project progress and discussed next steps. We’re also glad that, this time, we remembered to take group photos—capturing both the teamwork and the good pizza 🍕 and food generously provided by our PI, Dr. Jiaying Liu ❤️！