Yingru Ji (PhD) is a tenure-track assistant professor and doctoral supervisor in the College of Media and International Cultures at Zhejiang University. She earned her bachelor’s degree in Chinese Literature and master’s degree in Communication with highest honors from Zhejiang University, and her doctoral degree in Communication from the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Her research areas include strategic communication and public relations, human-machine communication, and risk and crisis communication. She has long focused on individuals’ psychological mechanisms and communication behaviors in organizational negative events and societal-level online firestorms. Her forthcoming book, “Attribution Bias: The Public Opinion Psychology in the Social Media Era,” emphasizes that attribution bias should be viewed as a sensitizing concept, aiming to remind the public to carefully consider their attributional psychology and subsequent communication behaviors, and to raise awareness and vigilance about attribution bias.

Recently, her research has concentrated on two main areas: first, the strategic communication and relationship management of Chinese corporations in cross-cultural contexts, with a particular focus on leadership, corporate social responsibility, ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance), and sustainable development communication; second, the communication strategies and relationship management between humans and machines. Her research has been published in top-tier communication journals and has repeatedly won best paper awards at prestigious international communication conferences such as the annual conferences of the International Communication Association (ICA) and the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC).