Please join us in congratulating Yuning Liu on successfully defending her PhD dissertation, “Understanding Digital Well-Being in Social Media Use: App-Specific Use, Goal Pursuit, and Platform Designs”! Before heading off to her next opportunity, we asked Yuning to reflect on her time in GHP.
What did you most enjoy about your time in GHP?
What I loved most about GHP was its breadth. I did my SM2 here, then went to work in the real world to figure out how to contribute with a global health background. When COVID hit, I became deeply curious about how social media shapes human life, and I came back to PHS to explore that. GHP gave me the freedom to learn from scholars across Harvard and MIT from different backgrounds including psychology, business, law, education, and computer science, and that intellectual range defined my time here.
What was the most interesting or surprising finding from your dissertation?
My dissertation started with a simple question: when is social media use good or bad for well-being? I’m graduating with far more questions than answers, which feels unintuitively right. I have learned that research is a process of sitting in the fog and slowly finding your footing.
The two things I’m most convinced of:
Human behavior is far more complicated than we assume, and before we optimize social media, AI, and digital technology for engagement, we as researchers have a responsibility to ask what human flourishing actually means in this process.
A lot of challenges in the governance of AI and social media can draw wisdom from public health. For example, how societal consensus around smoking control was built and translated into policy, or how standardized approaches to pharmaceutical development were established to protect stakeholder interests and preserve human health.
Do you have any plans for your next steps?
For the next step, I want to try academia. I’ll be joining Harvard Business School as a postdoctoral fellow, continuing work at the intersection of social media, AI, agency, and well-being. It’s a deeply interdisciplinary space. I engage with communities across mobile communication, social psychology, computational social science, and the psychology of technology, and hope to bring my global public health background into these conversations. I’m still finding my niche and framing, but I’m moving forward one step at a time, with curiosity, passion, and hope.
About The Author
Kimberly Ploeg
Executive assistant to Marcia Castro, chair of the Department of Global Health and Population
