Faculty Profile for Dr. Kristen Sussman

Biography Section

Biography and Education

Kristen L. Sussman, Ph.D. (University of Texas at Austin), is an advertising scholar and computational social scientist with expertise in social media and online advertising. She leverages advanced knowledge of native and third-party social media platforms to connect, monitor, and assess consumer behavior, with an interest in AI-mediated communication.

Dr. Sussman draws on her entrepreneurial background having owned and operated one of the first social media marketing agencies in Austin, TX from from 2011 to 2019. The award-winning agency, Social Distillery, was founded on a mission to deliver long-term, powerful, and measurable results while creating marketing campaigns that people love.

Dr. Sussman and her team were part of the first to scale social business strategies for notable clients including Facebook (now Meta), Dairy Queen, Chuy's Restaurants, Micro Focus (now HPE), Spredfast (now Khoros), Farm Credit Bank of Texas, Jive Software, KVUE-TV, H-E-B, John Deere, and many, many others.

In 2019, when Sussman returned to academia, the agency was acquired, allowing her to focus fully on her coursework dedicated to learning data science, statistics, and computational methods.

Teaching Interests

Dr. Sussman's teaching interests are in advertising strategy, business, new media, media technology, engagement, data science, marketing analytics, and computational methods.

Dr. Sussman's prior teaching appointments include The University of Texas at Austin and St. Edward's Bill Munday School of Business. She has also consulted corporate communications teams, leading the design and implementation of curriculum in enterprise tech adoption and continuing education focused on online advertising.

Research Interests

Dr. Sussman recently soft launched the Media, AI and Persuasion Lab, focusing on research at the intersection of AI and social media technology.

Her research focuses on the impact of online communications and AI. Dr. Sussman aims to uncover important relationships between advancements in generative AI technology and media effects, consumer behavior, and social network engagement.

In 2023, Dr. Sussman joined as Co-PI on a City of Austin grant where she is contributing her expertise to explore how AI and social media can help serve emergency communication needs.

Her work contributes across disciplines and has been published in a variety of journals and conferences including computing, business, advertising, marketing, and health communication.

Sussman recently presented research exploring the effects of AI-mediated communication on language complexity and sentiment at the ACM Web Conference (2025) in Sydney, Australia and is a member of the American Academy of Advertising (AAA) and the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC).