Behavioral research for platforms that want to understand their users—not just measure them.
Alex P.
Leith, PhD
Associate Professor (Tenured) of Mass Communications · Director, SIM Lab @ SIUE
Tenured researcher and practicing consultant. Work spans social platforms, online gaming, VR/XR environments, and trust & safety—with formal research partnerships with Riot Games and VRChat ongoing. Co-PI on a completed $1.6M NSF initiative; active grant pipeline of $1.3M+ pending.
What I Work On
Social VR & XR Environments
How people form relationships, experience presence, and behave in virtual spaces—including social VR platforms, virtual classrooms, and immersive games. Foundational for platform design, onboarding systems, and safety policy in emerging spatial computing environments.
Trust, Safety & Community Governance
Harassment typologies, hate speech detection, moderation effectiveness, and the behavioral mechanics of toxic and prosocial communities. Relevant to trust & safety teams, platform policy groups, and organizations designing or auditing community governance systems.
Parasocial Media & Behavioral Analytics
How audiences form emotional bonds with streamers, creators, and characters—and what platform features drive or disrupt those bonds. Built on large-scale behavioral datasets including 321M+ Twitch chat messages and 5M+ proprietary player records from Riot Games.
Mixed-Methods Research Design
Surveys, experiments, semi-structured interviews, NLP corpus analysis, and structural topic modeling—often combined in a single study. For anyone who needs findings that will hold up to scrutiny from product teams, program officers, and peer reviewers alike.
Track Record
NSF FW-HTF-R
Co-PI · $1.6MFive-study mixed-methods program on virtual meeting equity for game developers (2021–2025). Formal data access partnership with VRChat; produced 13 peer-reviewed publications and 7 conference proceedings across an international team of 30+ researchers.
Riot Games Partnership
Formal Data AgreementFormal research data agreement with Riot Games providing access to 5M+ proprietary player behavioral records. Findings on gaming behavior and identity published in peer-reviewed journal.
Twitch Corpus Study
Dissertation · 321M RecordsDistributed Raspberry Pi cluster collecting 321M chat messages across 117,943 channels. Developed original NLP verbal immediacy scoring methodology; published findings on parasocial relationships at scale in Communication Monographs.
Pending Grant Pipeline
~$1.35M in ReviewThree grants in active review: NSF Future CoRe (PI, $496K), NSF Collaborative Research (PI, $50K), and Wellcome Trust (Co-I, $800K) in collaboration with the University of Zambia.
Work With Me
Research Consulting
Applied behavioral research for product, policy, or strategy teams. Study design through final deliverable—methods, analysis, and findings you can use.
Grant Partnerships
Seeking co-PI and co-investigator relationships for NSF, NIH, Wellcome Trust, or foundation proposals. Particularly interested in human-computer interaction, platform behavior, and AI-augmented environments.
Speaking & Teaching
Conference keynotes, executive briefings, and workshops on social platforms, trust & safety, VR/XR behavior, and computational research methods.
Software Licensing
Research tools built at SIM DAD LLC—including TASS (text analysis) and Ibis (transcription)—available for institutional and commercial licensing. See simdadllc.com.
Selected Publications
- Leith, A. P. (2021). Parasocial cues: The ubiquity of parasocial relationships on Twitch. Communication Monographs, 88, 111–129. https://doi.org/10.1080/03637751.2020.1868544 Demonstrates how Twitch’s live platform features systematically drive parasocial bond formation at scale, establishing a corpus-based methodology for measuring viewer–streamer relationships across 321M+ messages.
- Foxman, M., Beyea, D., Leith, A. P., Ratan, R. A., Chen, V. H. H., & Klebig, B. (2022). Beyond genre: Classifying virtual reality experiences. IEEE Transactions on Games, 14(3), 466–477. https://doi.org/10.1109/TG.2021.3119521 Proposes a taxonomy that moves beyond gaming genre labels to classify the full spectrum of VR experiences, giving platform designers and researchers a shared vocabulary for what immersive media actually is.
- Lim, C., Ratan, R., Foxman, M., Beyea, D., Jeong, D., & Leith, A. P. (2025). Examining attitudes about the virtual workplace: Associations between Zoom fatigue, impression management, and virtual meeting adoption intent. PLOS One. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0312354 Finds that Zoom fatigue and impression management anxiety predict lower intent to adopt virtual meetings, with direct implications for how platforms design meeting tools and frame adoption to their users.