HCI Ph.D. · Crisis informatics · Product research
Julie A. Vera, Ph.D.
Weatherfluencers, trust, and collective sensemaking in severe weather livestreams.
I study how audiences evaluate YouTube-native weather creators whose professional standing is contested. My research examines how credibility, legitimacy, usefulness, and trustworthiness are worked out in real time through radar interpretation, official warnings, source comparison, local reports, livestream chat, and visible revision.
This work gives me a concrete way into behavioral evaluation: how to define and study trust, reliance, usefulness, and decision quality when human judgment is noisy, situated, and not reducible to a single right answer.
Why audiences return to weatherfluencers — and how trust changes across events.
I’m extending my dissertation work beyond single livestreams to study why audiences return to particular weatherfluencers across severe weather events, when trust accumulates or erodes, and how creators become familiar, useful, or suspect over time.
I’m especially interested in the community layer around severe weather interpretation: livestream chat, local observation, ground-truth reports, personal weather stations, volunteer networks, moderation, vouching, and other forms of participation that help audiences make unfolding conditions actionable.
I’m not treating weather as a metaphor for everything. The weather case matters because it makes a difficult problem unusually observable: how people evaluate interpretation while expertise, evidence, accountability, and risk are all still in motion.
Research in practice
My industry work focuses on evidence for high-consideration decisions: how people interpret information, where confidence breaks down, and what product teams need to know before they commit to a direction.
At AutoNation, I lead research across vehicle discovery, selling and trade-in experiences, online purchase flows, content strategy, photography standards, AI-assisted shopping tools, and customer confidence in automotive retail.
Selected publications & talks
Peer-reviewed papers, invited talks, media, and public writing across HCI, crisis informatics, platform studies, trust & safety, and social computing.
Let’s talk
For research leadership roles, collaborations, talks, writing, or strange high-stakes information problems, get in touch.
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