Elizabeth “Lizzie” Li
I'm a fourth-year PhD candidate at Northwestern University studying Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). I work with Dr. Jeremy Birnholtz in the Social Media Lab and Dr. Darren Gergle in the CollabLab. My research examines how people navigate the messy realities of constructing and evaluating authenticity on social media platforms in the age of AI.
I received my MA in Human Rights Studies at Columbia University where I was advised by Dr. Steven Bellovin. My thesis explored information sharing behaviors of Hinge dating app users. While at Columbia, I was also a research fellow at the Columbia Privacy Lab where I conducted a digital ethnography to ascribe meaning to emerging anti-privacy behaviors among dating app users. I was also a fellow at Columbia Entrepreneurship's eLab.
I received my BS from Cornell University in 2019 with a double major in Communication and Development Sociology and a minor in Inequality Studies.
Recent Updates
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- October 2026 Back at CSCW, this time in Salt Lake City! So nice to catch up with friends. I also co-organized the workshop "The Capacity to Care: Designing Social Technology for Sustained Engagement With Societal Challenges" and was so grateful for such a great group of participants and conversations.
- October 2026 Fun to be quoted as an expert source in Wired on why "dunking" on dating app profiles has become content gold, and why people are getting sick of it.
- July 2026 Spending the summer as a UX Research Intern at an early-stage startup building an AI assistant for older adults, talking with older adults and caregivers about the kind of support they actually want. (Case study here!)
- June 2026 Hello from Singapore! Presenting a new paper with Supraja Sudarsan, Harper Barnowski, and Calvin Liang at DIS 2026 in the Algorithmic Intimacy and Identity session: "The Cruel Optimism of Staying: Understanding the Role of Affect and Adaptation in Dating App Persistence." We explore why people keep using dating apps even when the apps wear them down, and find that hope plays a big part. (Case study here!)
- October 2025 So thrilled to present my first paper at CSCW 2025 with Annika Pinch, Justine Fisher, Darren Gergle, and Jeremy Birnholtz, and even more thrilled that it received a Best Paper Honorable Mention! The paper looks at how BeReal tries to design for authenticity, and how users practice it on their own terms.
- July 2025 Very fun to join Amanda Montell on her podcast Magical Overthinkers to talk all things parasocial relationships.
- April 2025 Student volunteering at CHI 2025 in Yokohama, Japan, and attending the UX Research POV workshop.
- October 2024 Quoted in The Daily Northwestern on an AI dating assistant designed by a fellow Northwestern student.
- October 2023 Attended my very first academic conference, CSCW 2023 in Minneapolis!
- September 2023 Published "Screenshot, share, and save," a write-up of my Columbia Privacy Lab research on why people post dating app profiles to Reddit, TikTok, and Facebook.
- September 2023 Excited to start my PhD in Media, Technology & Society at Northwestern!
- February 2023 Wrapped up my MA in Human Rights Studies at Columbia with a thesis on privacy and self-disclosure on Hinge.