Faculty Profiles

Kristen L. Sussman, Ph.D. (University of Texas at Austin), is an advertising scholar and computational social scientist whose research examines how artificial intelligence reshapes persuasion, emotion, and engagement in digital environments. Her work sits at the intersection of advertising, social media, and AI-mediated communication, with a particular focus on how language, framing, and affect influence behavioral responses at scale.

Dr. Sussman’s research program integrates computational methods (e.g., natural language processing, machine learning, network analysis) with theory from advertising, psychology, and communication to study real-world social media and advertising systems. Her work contributes to emerging scholarship on AI-mediated communication, moral and emotional framing, and digital engagement, and has been published in leading journals and conference proceedings across advertising, marketing, computing, and health communication.

She is the founder and director of the Media, AI, and Persuasion Lab, where she leads interdisciplinary research on the social and behavioral implications of generative AI in advertising, emergency communication, and public-facing information environments.

Before entering academia full-time, Dr. Sussman spent nearly a decade as an entrepreneur, founding and leading Social Distillery—one of Austin’s early social media marketing agencies. She helped scale data-driven social and advertising strategies for national and global organizations, including Facebook (now Meta), H-E-B, John Deere, Dairy Queen, Chuy’s Restaurants, and enterprise technology firms. This industry experience continues to inform her research, teaching, and applied partnerships by grounding theory in real-world media systems.

Dr. Sussman joined Texas State University in 2022, where she teaches advertising strategy, media technology, and data-driven communication. She previously taught at the University of Texas at Austin and St. Edward’s University and has consulted on professional education initiatives focused on digital advertising, analytics, and emerging media technologies.