Dan Hiaeshutter-Rice
Bio
Dan Hiaeshutter-Rice is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Advertising + Public Relations. He is the director of the Advertising Analytics program. He received his PhD from the University of Michigan's Department of Communication and Media. While at Michigan, he was affiliated with the Center for Political Studies at the Institute for Social Research. He also holds a Master of Public Policy degree from the Gerald R. Ford School for Public Policy at The University of Michigan and is a Michigan State University alum.
Personal website: https://www.dhrice.org/
Roles
Dr. Hiaeshutter-Rice is the Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Advertising and Public Relations (starting Fall 2026). He is also the Director of the Advertising Analytics program in the ADPR department and is a faculty affiliate at the Health Risk Communication Center.
Research and Teaching
Dr. Hiaeshutter-Rice is the director of the ASPECT (Affordances, Social Identity, Political Communication, E-Health, Communication Technologies) Lab, where his research program examines how communication technologies shape the production, distribution, and reception of information across political, health, and environmental contexts.
Dr. Hiaeshutter-Rice's research explores how variations in technology and affordances shape communication. He primarily works in the United States political context and uses large-scale data collection and computational research methods to inform typologies of communication platforms. Central to his work is the Identity Driven Information Ecosystem (IDIE) framework, which highlights how social identities, including political, cultural, and group affiliations, systematically influence the information environments people inhabit and how they process the information they encounter.
In addition to his primary research in political communication, Dr. Hiaeshutter-Rice studies systematic biases in information environments by examining how algorithms and user behavior influence content exposure and engagement. He investigates how lifestyle cues and cultural signals shape political evaluations, and how identity-driven processes extend into domains beyond traditional politics—including health and wellness communication, where his work maps digital wellness content on social media and examines how audiences engage with health information of varying credibility.
Dr. Hiaeshutter-Rice's research also examines social identity and social norms as predictors of health-related behaviors, including sports gambling engagement among college students. This work draws on social identity theory and normative influence frameworks to understand how group membership and perceived peer behavior shape individual engagement with emerging technologies such as mobile betting platforms. In addition, Dr. Hiaeshutter-Rice works with environmental and science communication messaging, studying how platforms, content framing, and source credibility play a role in message reception and effectiveness—including work on how environmental organizations frame climate change, how language choices affect engagement with invasive species communication, and how science influencers contribute to polarization around politicized science.
Dr. Hiaeshutter-Rice primarily uses computational research methods in addition to survey and experimental work. His work often deals with content analysis, notably at large scale.