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First papers

Alt text: A group of graduate students stand in a bright indoor space, gathered around research posters displayed on black presentation boards.

UMSI PhD students share advice on how to publish your first research paper

02/11/2026

What it took, what surprised them, and what they wish they had known sooner. 

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First Paper Friday. Chang Ge. PhD Student. What does the public want their local government to hear? A data-driven case study of public comments across the state of Michigan. Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media.

What does the public want their local government to hear?

01/23/2026

UMSI PhD student Chang Ge examines what the public raises during city council meetings, and how local concerns intersect with broader societal issues. 

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First Paper Friday. Lavinia Dunagan. PhD Candidate. Characterizing Religious Rhetoric in the U.S Congressional Record. Association for Computers and the Humanities.

First Paper Friday: Lavinia Dunagan

12/19/2025

Dunagan’s paper traces how members of Congress use Christian language to define identity, morality and power in American politics.

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First Paper Friday. Stella Chang. PhD student. Mind the Gap: How BabyLMs Learn Filler-Gap Dependencies. 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing.

First Paper Friday: Stella Chang

11/06/2025

Chang’s paper examines whether small-scale “baby” language models can learn complex grammar rules in ways that resemble how children acquire language.

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1st Paper Friday. James Dumlao. PhD Candidate. Geographical diversity of peer reviewers shapes author success. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

First Paper Friday: James Dumlao

10/17/2025

Dumlao’s paper shows how the lack of geographic diversity in peer review can shape what science gets published. 

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Soo Ji Serisse Choi. PhD Student. Improving Affective Associations with a Message-Based mHealth Intervention (WalktoJoy): Proof of Concept Study. Journal of Medical Internet Research.

First Paper Friday: Soo Ji Serisse Choi

09/12/2025

Choi’s paper explores how mobile health interventions can improve people’s emotional connection with physical activity, making it more sustainable and enjoyable. 

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1st Paper Friday. Haobo Zhang. PhD Student. Unraveling LoRA Interference: Orthogonal Subspaces for Robust Model Merging. 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

First Paper Friday: Haobo Zhang

07/11/2025

Zhang’s first paper as a UMSI PhD student tackles a major challenge in large language model efficiency. 

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First Paper Friday. Yongjie Sha, PhD Student. Meeting People Where They Are: Building Community Centered Care with Smartphone Facilitated Response to Overdoses. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction.

First Paper Friday: Yongjie Sha

02/14/2025

Sha’s paper studies the impact of a community-driven effort to reverse overdoses through a smartphone app. 

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Sena Kojah. PhD Student. Dialing it Back: Shadowbanning, Invisible Digital Labor, and how Marginalized Content Creators Attempt to Mitigate the Impacts of Opaque Platform Governance. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction.

First Paper Friday: Sena Kojah

01/24/2025

Kojah’s paper explores the disproportionate impact of shadowbanning on social media platforms on content creators with marginalized identities. 

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First Paper Friday. Ghadir Awad. PhD Student. Digital Repression in Palestine. Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

First Paper Friday: Ghadir Awad

08/09/2024

UMSI PhD student Ghadir Awad’s first paper explores internal digital repression in Palestine.

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