Dr. Terri N. Hernandez is an Associate Professor of Public Relations in the Department of Communication at Mississippi State University, where she also serves as the Public Relations Concentration Coordinator. Her research explores the intersections of social and digital media, inter/intragroup relations, and consumer behavior, focusing on organization–public relationships, branding, and strategic communication. She has years of experience working with social media datasets, applying quantitative and qualitative methodologies to explore the data. Further, her scholarship spans both theoretical and applied domains, integrating insights from social science with professional practice, such as user experience design in websites and other digital applications. Her collaborative work with the NSF and MSU’s SSRC has expanded her expertise into large-scale data analytics, machine learning, and interdisciplinary research infrastructure. In particular, her recent NSF-funded projects involve building data repositories and developing methods to analyze social media data, addressing challenges like restricted access to platforms like X (Twitter). By creating accessible research tools, she aims to support scholars in examining critical social phenomena, including misinformation spread and public sentiment during crises. Dr. Hernandez’s work has appeared in leading journals such as the Journal of Consumer Marketing, Social Media and Society, and Computers & Human Behavior. She has co-authored multiple peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters, and her creative scholarship has earned more than 30 professional awards from PR associations, including SPRF and PRAM.
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1939-7266
Contribution to Project: Co-PI Dr. Terri Hernandez’s (Communication & UX Design Social Scientist) expertise also aligns with conducting user experience research where she will lead the user experience studies from the beginning stages of the design to the evaluation phase of the project. Hernandez also has experience developing websites (having also developed the current COPE-ID and DS3 websites referenced earlier).