Digital Strength | Team

Sunny Xun Liu is a Research Scholar and the Director of Research at Stanford Social Media Lab. Liu earned her Ph.D. in Mass Communication and Media from Michigan State University. Her research focuses on the social and psychological effects of social media and AI, social media and well-being, digital literacy, and how the design of social robots and AI impact psychological perceptions. Before joining Stanford, she was an Associate Professor at California State University, Stanislaus. She has won top 3 faculty paper awards from ICA and AEJMC and published in communication and psychology journals. She has served on the Chinese Communication Association’s Steering Committee and the ICA and AEJMC Research Chair and a steering committee member on PRISM (Promoting Research in Social Media and Health Symposium). Her research has been funded by NSF, Army Research Office, Google Research, and Stanford HAI and has been published in multiple psychology and communication journals.

Sindy Braun is a Senior Advisor to the Stanford Social Media Lab, having recently completed a fellowship with the Stanford Distinguished Careers Institute. With 30+ years of experience in the software industry focused on continually adding value to high-tech enterprises, customers, and diverse global employees, Sindy brings her strategic, operational, and people leadership skills, as well as her passion for serving the global community, to solve gnarly problems confronting organizations and society. Leveraging her experience across Marketing, Product Marketing, R&D, Operations, IT, Go-to-Market Strategy, and Human, Sindy has been able to bring together multiple stakeholders to transform complex challenges into innovative, scalable solutions through organizational technological and market changes. Sindy has worked for some of Silicon Valley’s high-growth B2B companies, including VMware, Webex, Oracle, and a number of smaller startups. Originally from South Africa, Sindy now resides in the San Francisco Bay Area with her wife.

Shubhi Mathur is a Program Manager with the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO), supporting the digital literacy project. She is a graduate of the Master of Public Policy program at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research thesis on prioritization of certain digital trust and safety practices over others has been selected and presented at prestigious conferences like TrustCon 2023 and Stanford Trust & Safety Conference. She has over 8 years of experience in policy design, stakeholder collaboration and advocacy. Prior to SIO, she advised the Government of India's newly established skills regulator, the National Council for Vocational Education & Training on designing policy guidelines, which are currently being implemented in the country. Shubhi is a Computer Science Engineer by academic training and has extensive experience designing election campaigns.

Lonnie Shumsky is a Senior Advisor to the Social Media Lab. She is an Internal Medicine physician who has spent her career as a clinician educator with a focus on curriculum development, first at the University of Utah and then at the University of Washington. In 2021, Dr. Shumsky became the co-leader for the COVID-19 vaccine acceptance task force at her hospital. In 2023, she completed a two-year DCI fellowship at Stanford University focusing on social media and manipulation, behavioral science, and design-based problem solving. She currently leads the Stanford Social Media Lab’s initiative to bring research-based digital literacy training to communities at scale, in order to help increase the resilience of individuals to false information encountered online.

Debbie Siegel works as Sr. Advisor at Stanford Social Media Lab to bring evidence-based research into practical strategies to be used by the people and organizations who will most benefit from the findings. She joined the Social Media Lab after completing a fellowship in 2023 at the Stanford Distinguished Careers Institute (DCI) focused on social sciences, design, policy, and social impact. Her career as a technology executive was consistently at the intersection of the technical innovations of the day and the benefits to organizations and people. From startups to global organizations developing system solutions (hardware, software, networks, services) for business and industrial markets, she worked across a broad range of functions. Prior to the Stanford DCI program, she was Director of Business Development and Operations for a leading Austrian-based company providing safe networked computing platforms for a more connected, automated, and sustainable world. Her interests and expertise in scaling, market development, and partnerships are what brought her to the complex challenge of bridging research and real-world implementation.

Debbie holds a Masters in Linguistics from Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier, France, and an MBA from McGill University, Montreal, Canada. She is a native Canadian and speaks French fluently. She lives in Portola Valley with her husband in their newly empty nest. They travel together whenever they can and frequently make visits to see their three children.

Russ Stoddard is a Senior Advisor to Stanford’s Social Media Lab. He is recognized nationally for his work in branding and as a leader in the B Corp movement of businesses striving to create positive social and environmental impact. Russ is founder and CEO of Oliver Russell, a B Corp social impact branding agency in Boise, Idaho. He is also a co-founder of Unit Co., a startup founded by three certified B Corps to build the Unit of Impact measurement and reporting platform. Russ has started several nonprofits and served on numerous nonprofit boards. He is the author of the Amazon bestseller, Rise Up: How to Build a Socially Conscious Business, as well as a published poet and playwright. He lives on a small farm with his wife, Sarah, and their dogs Roux and Kali.