Qingyi Han Named Outstanding Senior

Class of 2021 graduate Qingyi Han has been named Outstanding Senior by the Department of Communication

Class of 2021 graduate Qingyi Han was this week named as the Outstanding Senior by the Department of Communication at UC Davis. The award is given each year to the single graduating senior deemed to best embody the ideals of scholarship and community espoused by the Department of Communication.

During her time at UC Davis, Qingyi has excelled in all her coursework and has been recognized by many professors and teaching assistants as the top student in class. Through a strong recommendation by her TA, Qingyi joined Dr. Jingwen Zhang' Communication in Health and Technology Research Lab (CHATR) as an undergraduate researcher, working in the lab for her last two years at Davis.

Qingyi worked on a content analysis on social media vaccine misinformation. She started from reading literature on vaccine misinformation and the anti-vaccine movements and led the initial development of a comprehensive codebook that classifies and defines different types of vaccine misinformation with concrete examples. Qingyi demonstrated her outstanding learning abilities and professionalism in this work.

In addition, Qingyi worked on a conference paper detailing the development of a multi-model machine learning classifier to automate the categorization of anti-vaccine posts and misinformation posts. Her work of the content analysis served as the basis, the training dataset, for developing the classifier. The conference paper has been accepted for the 2021 International Communication Association Conference, making Qingyi a co-author for the presentation, an outstanding achievement for an undergraduate student.

Graduating at the top of her class, Qingyi has made significant contributions to communication research in the Department.

Congratulations, Qingyi, on this honor – we are proud of you!