Tai-Quan "Winson" Peng Ph.D.

Winson Peng holds a Ph.D. from the City University of Hong Kong and currently serves as a Professor in the Department of Communication at Michigan State University (MSU). He assumed the position of associate professor with tenure in 2016 when he joined the Communication Department. Before joining MSU, he held the role of Assistant Professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore from 2013 to 2016 and at Macau University of Science and Technology in Macau from 2009 to 2013.

Over the course of his career, he has examined how different waves of communication technologies—starting with the internet and extending through social and mobile media to contemporary AI systems—change the ways people encounter information, form judgments, and engage with one another. Across these transitions, his work focuses on how evolving communication environments shape, and are shaped by, fundamental processes of attention, interpretation, and influence. 

A consistent theme in his scholarship is that emerging technologies do more than transform communication practices: they also offer new windows into human cognition and behavior. By engaging each technological shift as both an object of inquiry and a source of analytic innovation, he connects enduring and emerging theoretical questions in communication with the empirical possibilities opened by new forms of data, interaction, and representation. This approach has guided his work across areas such as computational social science, health communication, audience behavior, and political communication.

Currently, he serves as the Editor-in-Chief of Human Communication Research (2025 -) and previously served as Associate Editor for the Journal of Communication (2022 - 2024). He has also co-edited three special issues for Communication Methods and Measures (van Atteveldt & Peng, 2018), the Asian Journal of Communication (Peng et al., 2019), and the Journal of Communication (Peng & Wang, 2026), respectively. He was the co-founder and inaugural chair (2016-2017) of the Computational Methods Division at the International Communication Association.

Thematic Research Areas

Computational Communication

Research Centers and Labs

Quello Center
Health and Risk Communication Center