Liesel Sharabi studies the ways communication technologies are used to initiate, maintain, and dissolve interpersonal relationships. The focus of her work is on how technology is revealing and transforming basic principles of interpersonal communication. A primary goal of her research program is to better understand how people relate to each other through technology and what it means for their offline relationships.
She is especially interested in technology’s role in modern romance. Much of her research in this area is on the topic of online dating. For instance, she has written about matchmaking in online dating and studied the trajectories of online dating relationships from meeting through marriage. She regularly consults and collaborates with dating app startups on research and has given expert testimony in court cases involving online dating platforms. She is also interested in where dating could be headed in the future. This has led to research on multimodal relationships, the role of algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI) in facilitating intimate relationships, and interpersonal relationships in virtual reality (VR). As part of her work on the latter, she is an invited scholar on Dreamscape Learn and is partnering with industry to study the VR “datingverse.”
Her research has been published in a variety of edited volumes and peer-reviewed journals such as the Journal of Communication, Human Communication Research, Communication Research, Communication Monographs, New Media & Society, and the Harvard Data Science Review. She also blogs about "Dating in the Digital Age" for Psychology Today and has appeared in media outlets like Bloomberg, The Boston Globe, Time Magazine, the BBC, NPR, Cosmopolitan, Men’s Health, New York Magazine, and The Huffington Post. She is the recipient of the 2022 Early Career Award from the Interpersonal Communication Division of the National Communication Association.
Dr. Sharabi currently directs the Relationships and Technology Lab at Arizona State University. More information can be found on her website.