Skip to main content
AURA Lab

Who runs the lab

People.

Alex P. Leith, Director of AURA Lab — three-quarter portrait.

Alex P. Leith, PhD

  • Associate Professor (Tenured), Mass Communications, SIUE
  • Director, AURA Lab
  • Co-Founding Organizer, Meaningful XR

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.

The network

Collaborators.

Robby Ratan

  • Professor + AT&T Endowed Chair
  • Media & Information, Michigan State University
  • Visiting Scholar, Virtual Human Interaction Lab, Stanford

AvatarsUsersRelationshipsAffect

ORCID ↗

Chaeyun Lim

  • Postdoctoral Fellow
  • Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University

AvatarsUsersRelationshipsAffect

ORCID ↗

Maxwell Foxman

  • Associate Professor
  • School of Journalism and Communication, University of Oregon

AvatarsUsersRelationshipsAffect

ORCID ↗

David Beyea

  • Associate Professor
  • Department of Communication, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater

AvatarsUsersRelationshipsAffect

ORCID ↗

David C. Jeong

  • Assistant Professor
  • Department of Communication, Santa Clara University

AvatarsUsersRelationshipsAffect

ORCID ↗

Brian Klebig

  • Professor
  • Department of Communication, Bethany Lutheran College

AvatarsUsersRelationshipsAffect

ORCID ↗

In the lab

Students.

Undergraduate

  • Gerri Marion

Graduate

  • Michelle Poneleit

Where they are now

Alumni.

Undergraduate

  • Erin Gheen
  • Sam Baker
  • Dakota Kasper
  • Dallas Creech
  • Olivia Buente
  • Stephanie Schrage

Graduate

  • Mary Onuche
  • Amanda Cooper

Open lab

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.

How to join →