Dr. Yin Yin Lu (she/her)

Yin is a self-proclaimed Rhetoric Doctor, Communication Scientist, and Happiness Engineer. Professionally, she is or has been a product (marketing) manager, project manager, digital marketer, freelance consultant, researcher, social data scientist, writer, speaker, editor, founder, mentor, and teacher. She is intoxicated by language, particularly in the context of digital media.

Yin spent 4.5 years investigating the rhetoric and resonance of Brexit tweets at the Oxford Internet Institute (University of Oxford), and emerged with a doctorate in 2019. More importantly, she emerged with a rhetorical framework that can be used to improve the resonance of any message. She applies it every single day to every single form of communication that she produces or consumes (including this one).

While at the Oxford Internet Institute, Yin was actively involved with data-oriented research projects for the Rockefeller Foundation, the Alan Turing Institute, and the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies at the Oxford Law Faculty. She was a visiting researcher at the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research under a Horizon 2020 big data grant, and founded the #SocialHumanities research network at the University of Oxford to unite social media researchers and practitioners from every imaginable background.

Yin has been interviewed by numerous media outlets on digital communication and politics (including Sky News, Wired, the Guardian, the Times, the Telegraph, and El País). Prior to nosediving into the ‘new media’ tech world, she worked in ‘old media’ publishing (Pearson Education, Columbia University Press, New York Review of Books, Inside New York).

On a higher, more whimsical level: Yin is caught betwixt academia and industry, fact and fiction, life and art. And she wouldn’t have it any other way.