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.

Dr. Sussman’s research integrates computational methods (e.g., natural language processing, computational linguistics, 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 recently launched 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 founded and led Social Distillery, one of Austin’s first social media marketing agencies. She was able to see a lot of conversations occurring between people. She used that data to help business and corporate communications teams understand people and consumer behavior. She developed strategic, data-driven strategies for national and global organizations, including Facebook (now Meta), H-E-B, John Deere, Dairy Queen, Chuy’s Restaurants, and served global enterprise technology firms. Dr. Sussman's industry experience continues to inform her work as a researcher and professor.

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.