Who runs the lab
People.
Alex P. Leith, PhD
- Associate Professor (Tenured), Mass Communications, SIUE
- Director, AURA Lab
- Co-Founding Organizer, Meaningful XR
- Editor, Journal of Media Psychology
My research sits at the intersection of three threads. First, mediated presence in virtual environments — how communication changes when the channel is a VR headset, a livestream chat, a videoconference grid, or a 3D social world. Second, computational methods in communication research — building and using corpus-scale tools (sentiment, topic models, network methods, LLMs) on real social-media and platform data, with explicit attention to what the methods do and don't license you to claim. Third, open-research pedagogy — translating the above into materials that make research methods learnable by undergraduates with no prior stats, methods, or coding background.
Across all three: fit over prestige, transparency over claim inflation. I publish to be read and reused, not to climb a ladder.
Students & collaborators
Currently recruiting.
AURA Lab is open to students and researchers from any institution — at SIUE, across the consortium, or anywhere else. Available paths include empirical work on existing corpora (Twitch chat, VRChat tweets, pandemic remote-work tweets), methods + tool building, conference co-authorship, and — for SIUE students specifically — URCA mentoring and MA thesis chairing or committee work.