In 2019, Prof. Liang Hai was awarded the Young Researcher Award 2018. The Young Researcher Award is nominated annually by each Faculty to recognize young academic staff with exemplary research achievements.

Prof. Liang Hai published an article entitled “Broadcast versus viral spreading: the structure of diffusion cascades and selective sharing on social media” on Journal of Communication, and an article entitled “Network redundancy and information diffusion: The impacts of information redundancy, similarity, and tie strength” on Communication Research.

The two articles were published in the most important and prestigious journals in communication research. The articles focused on the different aspects of a central question in communication research: information diffusion on social networks. By using advanced and innovative computational methods with large-scale digital media data, these studies are considered state-of-the-art in computational communication research. They also shed light on other neighbouring disciplines, such as sociology and political communication.

Congratulations to Hai!