An emerging theme of her research is a focus on understanding and improving information dissemination in organizational communication networks at interpersonal, small group, and inter-organizational levels. Her dissertation is a continuation of this theme, and she empirically investigated various motivating factors associated with people’s information sharing activities through digital repositories in organizational project teams. She also undertook a number of other research projects at the University of Illinois, including empirical research on information retrieval in small group knowledge networks (e.g., Contractor, et al. 2004; Huang, 2004), cultural influences on cross-organizational knowledge transfer (Huang, 2006), and young people’s self disclosure and impression formation during initial encounters (Clark, et al. 2004).
She had three years of public university teaching at University of Illinois, where she taught three undergraduate courses on organizational communication and computer-mediated communication. She looks forward to the opportunity to both teach existing courses and to complement the department current curriculum by developing new courses in the topic areas of organizational communication, small group communication, social networks, and research methods.
Mei was born in Chengdu, China, a lovely and vibrant city famous for hot and spicy Sichuan food as well as beautiful mountains and lakes. She got her B.A. degree from Beihang University in Beijing, China, in 2001. She enjoys cooking, hiking, gardening, and skiing. She is an expert at Chinese calligraphy.