Meet The Media MOSAIC Lab!
Muniba Saleem, Ph.D.
Principal Investigator
Dr. Muniba Saleem obtained her PhD in Social Psychology from Iowa State University and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Saleem studies how media affects interpersonal and intergroup relations between racial, ethnic, and religious groups using social scientific methods. Applying social psychological theories, Dr. Saleem has studied the effects of media representations of marginalized groups in violent contexts on hostile attitudes and support for harmful policies towards depicted members (Saleem & Anderson, 2013; Saleem et al., 2017). Recent work has examined how the same negative media depictions influence minority members’ social, psychological, and political outcomes (Saleem et al., 2023). Longitudinal and experimental research reveals that negative media depictions adversely influence immigrants’ integration and trust in American politics (Saleem et al., 2019) but at the same time minorities are motivated to seek collective action to improve their ingroup’s image and status in the larger society (Saleem et al., 2020; 2023). Dr. Saleem’s work has been published in journals such as Communication Research, Journal of Communication, Child Development, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, and American Psychologist. Her research has been funded by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, and Facebook.
Ismaharif Ismail, M.Soc.Sci.
Doctoral Candidate
Graduate Student Researcher
Lab Manager (Fall 2026 – Present)
Ismaharif Ismail is a doctoral candidate whose research broadly examines group processes, intergroup relations, and social identities in communication. His recent research focuses on how communication technologies are transforming intergroup communication and shaping broader intergroup dynamics. He uses a multimethod approach spanning laboratory experiments, longitudinal studies, fieldwork interventions, big-team science, latent variable modeling, and Monte Carlo simulations.
Ismaharif has published in leading journals across communication, psychology, and the broader social sciences, including Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Computers in Human Behavior, Social Psychological and Personality Science, Political Psychology, and Human Communication Research. His research has received international recognition, including top paper awards from the International Communication Association (2020, 2025), Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (2018), and National Communication Association (2026). He has also received university and departmental recognition through the UCSB Regents Fellowship and Putnam Interdisciplinary Scholar Award. His research has been supported by external funding from sources including the MOE-START Scheme and DSO National Laboratories, as well as internal funding such as UCSB’s African and Asian Students in STEM Scholarship.
Erick Garcia, M.A.
Ph.D. Student
Graduate Student Researcher
Erick (He/Him/Él) is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Communication at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His primary line of research focuses on online hate (cf. hate speech, cyberhate, digital hate), which spans topics such as explicit and implicit hate messages, dog whistles, hate-driven memes, prejudice, stereotypes, discrimination, and other forms of identity-based hostility communicated through digital media (e.g., racism, xenophobia, anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination, misogyny, and sexism).
Within online hate, his reserach agenda examines three primary lines of inquiry: (1) theoretically driven approaches to understanding how intergroup solidarity may motivate individual and collectivee bystander intervention (e.g., counterspeech) across group boundaries—with an emphasis on the social identity approach to explain how shared or recategorized identities may foster intra-minoirty solidarity across groups frequently targeted by online hate; (2) the social, psychological, and mediated processes that contribute to the continued propagation and perpetuation of online hate; and (3) the structural, historical, and contextual conditions that shape how hate is produced (by haters), experienced (by targets), and addressed (by individuals, collectives, and platfroms) in digitally mediated environments.
Beyond this primary research program, he also maintains a personal scholarly interest in theory construction. With a current interest in examining how digitally mediated environments shape broader social and psychological processes (viz. social/personal identity, cognition, agency, and the formation of the self). Drawing from meta-theoretical perspectives on structuration, time-space distanciation, and liminality, he is particularly interested in proposing a middle-range theory on how individuals exercise agency to negotiate the self, identity, and norms to navigate increasingly blurred online (digital) and offline (real-world) socio-structural boundaries.
His scholarship has been recognized nationally, including a Top Paper Award from the Group Communication Division at the National Communication Association (NCA) in 2025, and his research has been published in internationally recognized journals such as the International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction.
Additionally, he served as lab manager for the Media MOSAIC Lab from Summer 2025 to Summer 2026.
Stephanie Herrera
M.A./Ph.D. Student
Graduate Student Researcher
Stephanie Herrera is an MA/PhD student in the Department of Communication at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Stephanie earned her B.A. degree in Communication Technology from The Ohio State University. Her interests lie at the intersection of media effects and political communication. Herrera examines how traditional and social media shape individuals’ self-perceptions and intergroup attitudes.
Ying Qi Pan, M.A.
Graduate Student Researcher
Ying Qi Pan is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Communication at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research focuses on political communication, with a particular interest in gender inequalities in online political engagement. Her work explores (1) how individual and contextual factors influence digital political participation, using cross-national datasets, and (2) how the development of artificial intelligence shapes human-technology relations. Her methodological training is primarily quantitative.
Lab Alumni
Sovannie Len, Ph.D.
Sovannie Len (She/Her) is a recent Ph.D. graduate from the Department of Communication at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She earned a B.A. and M.A. in Psychology at San Jose State University before pivoting to the Communication field.
Sovannie’s research examines how race and identity transform in conjunction with a media environment, particularly entertainment media.
Additionally, she was the founding/previous lab manager for the Media MOSAIC Lab from Fall 2023 to Summer 2025.
Nancy Molina-Rogers, Ph.D.
UCLA Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow
Nancy Molina-Rogers earned both her doctoral and master’s degrees in Communication from the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) and is a Media MOSAIC Lab alumnus. Her research focuses on the relationship between social media and collective action among marginalized groups, with a particular emphasis on racial and ethnic identity. In her dissertation, she explored how advantaged and disadvantaged groups differ in their perceptions of social media as a tool for group-empowering online activities, such as collective action. As a UCLA Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow, Dr. Molina-Rogers is examining media literacy and political participation within the Latino/x/e community. Her work specifically focuses on the role of news consumption on social media platforms.