Dan Hiaeshutter-Rice

Dan Hiaeshutter-Rice is an Associate Professor in the Department of Advertising + Public Relations, where he studies how communication technologies shape the political, health, and environmental information people encounter. He directs the ASPECT Lab and the Advertising Analytics program.

He received his PhD from the University of Michigan's Department of Communication and Media, where he was affiliated with the Center for Political Studies at the Institute for Social Research. He also holds a Master of Public Policy from the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, and he is a Michigan State University alum.

Personal website: https://www.dhrice.org/

Dr. Hiaeshutter-Rice is Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Advertising and Public Relations and Director of the Advertising Analytics program. He chairs the department's research resources committee and serves on the advisory boards of the ICER Data Machine and the Strategic Communication master's program. He is a faculty affiliate of the Health and Risk Communication Center.

Dr. Hiaeshutter-Rice directs the ASPECT Lab (Affordances, Social Identity, Political Communication, E-Health, Communication Technologies), where his research examines how communication technologies shape the production, distribution, and reception of information. Much of this work develops the Identity Driven Information Ecosystem (IDIE) framework, which describes how political, cultural, and group identities shape both the information environments people occupy and how they interpret what they find there.

Working primarily in the United States political context, he uses large-scale data collection and computational methods, alongside surveys and experiments, to build typologies of communication platforms and to trace how algorithms and user behavior produce systematic biases in what people see. Related projects extend these questions beyond conventional politics. He studies how lifestyle cues and cultural signals inform political evaluation, how audiences engage with wellness content of varying credibility, and how social identity and perceived peer norms predict behaviors such as sports betting among college students. He also works in environmental and science communication, including how advocacy organizations frame climate change, how language choices affect engagement with invasive species messaging, and how science influencers contribute to polarization.

He teaches digital advertising analytics at the undergraduate level and programming and computational methods at the graduate level. He advises graduate students working on computational and political communication topics.