Brian Weeks is the director of the PAC Lab. He is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies and a Faculty Associate in the Center for Political Studies at the University of Michigan. His research focuses on two general topics: (1) how individuals are exposed to, engage with, evaluate, and learn from news and socially shared political information in digital media; and (2) the influence of political misinformation on beliefs and the effects of corrective messages. Weeks has published more than 35 articles in leading journals in the field of communication including the Journal of Communication, the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Human Communication Research, Communication Research, and elsewhere. His research has received awards from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, the National Communication Association, the American Political Science Association, and the World Association for Public Opinion Research. At Michigan he co-founded the Internet, Communication, & Politics Research Group and is a core member of the Political Communication Working Group.
Weeks received a B.A. in journalism and mass communication and political science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2005, a M.A. in mass communication from the University of Minnesota in 2010, and a Ph.D. in communication from the Ohio State University in 2014. Prior to joining the University of Michigan he was a faculty member at the University of Vienna in Austria.
Contact: beweeks@umich.edu