Hello world! My name is Lizzie Li. I'm a third-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 just published my first paper on the challenges of designing for and practicing authenticity, which received a Best Paper Honorable Mention award at CSCW 2025. You can read it here!
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.
Get in touch with me!
lizzieli [at] u [dot] northwestern [dot] edu