Join Us in Welcoming New Faculty Member, Dr. Eugene Cho!

Dear colleagues and students,

It is my great pleasure to introduce and welcome Dr. Eugene Cho who will join Department of Communication Studies as an Assistant Professor at The College of New Jersey in the fall.

Dr. Cho’s significant expertise and multi-methodological approach greatly complement the strengths of our existing faculty. Her research is focused on the user experience (UX) and psychology in new media technology, with a recent emphasis on voice interaction with smart speakers. Her latest study, presented at the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’20), won the honorable mention paper award. The study explored if customizing content and privacy settings affects user experience of smart speakers, and revealed counter-intuitive findings of how deleting voice interaction history to ensure data security can in fact make Alexa less trustworthy by evoking privacy concerns among users.

Prior to TCNJ, Dr. Cho received a University Fellowship in 2016 and Ph.D. in 2021 from Penn State University. At Penn State, she served as a coordinator for the Conversational Agent Study Group in collaboration with the College of Information Sciences and Technology, and the Facebook big-data project team under the Social Media and Democracy Research Grant Program in collaboration with computational data scientists.

Before relocating to the U.S., Dr. Cho received her M.A. in Communications from Seoul National University in 2014, and B.A. in Finance from Korea University in 2009. She also worked in the advertising and e-Commerce industry as a business analyst for several years back in her home country, South Korea. As the most recent industry position, she participated in an internship at Wayfair as a UX researcher in 2020.

We expect Dr. Cho to keep creating innovative, interdisciplinary research and to offer courses that bridge academia and practice. This fall, Dr. Cho will be teaching COM 390 Research Methods and COM 270 Special Topics: Emerging Communication Technologies.

We are sure Dr. Cho will expand the department curriculum and help the emerging media initiative in the School of the Arts and Communication. We also look forward to her building pipelines of internships and jobs for our students using her industry connections.

 

With warm regards,

Yifeng Hu, PhD

 

Chair and Associate Professor

Department of The Communication Studies

School of Arts and Communication

The College of New Jersey