Hello!

I am an assistant professor in the Department of Advertising in the College of Media at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and an affiliate of the Illinois Informatics Program and the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. This fall, I will be relocating to Michigan State University to join the faculty of the Department of Communication. I completed my Ph.D. in Communication at the University of California Santa Barbara, where I conducted research in the Media Neuroscience Lab, and served as a trainee in the NSF IGERT program in Network Science and Big Data.

My primary research interests lie at the intersection of digital technology, attention, and decision making. My current work in this area uses functional neuroimaging, behavioral measures, and computational modeling to explore how effort requirements, perceptual complexity, and motivational factors in digital contexts influence attention and goal pursuit. You can find a full list my recent publications and preprints here.

I also work to build theory and refine methods in media psychology and adjacent domains. As a part of these efforts, I’ve played a role in creating a few publicly available research tools, including a command-line tool for applying the Extended Moral Foundations Dictionary (eMFD), and an interface for the Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone (GDELT).

When I’m not working, I enjoy cooking, traveling, listening to music, writing code, and lifting heavy things from time to time. Please feel free to reach out to me on Twitter, or via email at jtfisher[at]illinois[dot]edu.