People

We're an interdisciplinary group across multiple institutions. Faculty, postdocs, graduate students, affiliates, and alumni are listed below (in alphabetical order within each section) except when we've failed at alphabetizing.

You can see pictures of all together over at our group photos page. Pictures of us individually are below.

We are a friendly group and we welcome new affiliates! If you have been working with us for a while, perhaps it's time to add yourself to this page as an affiliate. Feel free to add yourself (use the Edit tab) in the appropriate subsection organized alphabetically by last name, and please include a sentence on HOW you are related to the group (and a fun picture of yourself!).

You can read more about these categories in our Roles page here.

Jeremy Foote (Purdue University)



 * Pronouns: he/him

I grew up in Nevada, did my undergrad (in English!) at BYU in Utah, and then worked as a practitioner of online collaboration. I was the product manager for a small collaborative translation company in Utah. I decided that I cared a lot more about understanding collaboration than designing software, and I came back to school. I did a Master's degree at Purdue, studying with Seungyoon Lee, and then worked on a PhD at Northwestern, as a member of CDSC. I'm now back at Purdue in the Brian Lamb School of Communication, this time as a faculty member.

Most of my current research is focused around understanding how people decide where to participate in online communities--why people start new communities, how community membership influences future behavior, and how communication structures relate to community outcomes. I'm particularly interested in how these decisions scale up into the social construction of understanding, knowledge, and opinion. More about my research is at my academic homepage.

Much of my spare time is spent with my family (my wife and I have 5 kids!) or with my church community. I love the Midwest but really miss hiking and skiing in the mountains and try to do both as much as possible.

Benjamin Mako Hill (University of Washington)



 * Pronouns: he/him

After contributing peer production communities in various ways since I was a teenager, I began to realize (the hard way) that building community online is... difficult and complicated! After being (mostly) convinced that academia was the right place to fix this, I've spent an increasingly large portion of my life to trying to contribute to an emerging science of Internet-based collaborative production. Since beginning my academic career, I have published tens of thousand of articles! Sadly, nearly all of them are words the, a, and an.

In the more boring accounting (which I've copied and pasted from elsewhere): I am an Associate Professor in the University of Washington Department of Communication and an Adjunct Associate Professor in the departments of Human-Centered Design and Engineering as well as in the Information School and the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering. At UW, I am also Affiliate Faculty in the Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences, the eScience Institute, and the "Design Use Build" (DUB) group that supports research on on human computer interaction. I am also a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and an affiliate of the Institute of Quantitative Social Science at Harvard.

Much more information is on my academic homepage. If you need to find me, I have put more detailed contact information online than I probably should.

Aaron Shaw (Northwestern University)



 * Pronouns: he/him

Hello! I'm Aaron (he/they). I grew up around New York and went to school for a while in northern California. Along the way, I got involved in participatory movements and projects of various kinds. At first, these were more traditional movements advancing egalitarian social agendas. Over time, I got involved in peer production projects, online communities, and other sorts of open collaboration online.

These days, I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern where I am affiliated with the Media, Technology & Society (MTS) Program and the Technology & Social Behavior Program, courtesy appointed in the Sociology Department, a faculty associate of the Institute for Policy Research, the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs, the Center for Human-Computer Interaction + Design, and the SONIC lab. Elsewhere, I am a faculty associate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. A good place to find more information is my website. If you'd like to get in touch, please [mailto:aaronshaw@northwestern.edu send me an email] (and don't be shy about re-sending if I don't reply).

Kevin Ackermann (Northwestern University)
Hiiii! I'm Kevin. (∩｀-´)⊃━☆ﾟ.*･｡ﾟ

I'm a second year PhD Student in the Media, Technology and Society program at Northwestern University. I'm interested in studying impacts of commercialization on digital community space, historicizing platform governance conversations, and thinking about the political (and emotional) ramifications of quantification. In the past, my attempts to study these topics have largely revolved around studying dead computer networks of the 80s and 90s. Said another way, I'm interested in how communities form and falter online, and what it's like to be a part of one.

I've spent years of my pre-PhD life honing archival methodology skills, so I'm a sucker for qualitative storytelling, but I hope to try out myriad methods in my graduate studies. There are so many ways to know things!

Kaylea Champion (University of Washington)


I (she/her) am investigating how organizations collaborate to build information public goods -- groovy things like Linux and Wikipedia. What gets made and maintained -- and what gets neglected?

After growing up in Oregon, I spent two decades in Chicago, primarily at the University of Chicago as an academic technology director and consultant. I have a BA in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and an MS in Computer Science, both from the University of Chicago. I also hold an MA in Critical & Creative Thinking from the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

My husband, three kids, and I live in Shoreline, WA, which seems to be Seattle's version of Evanston. I'm particularly fond of visiting museums, tromping in the woods, cooking for crowds, smashing goblins, and scribbling fiction.

Hsuen-Chi (Hazel) Chiu (Purdue University)


Hello! I am a First year PhD student in the Brian Lamb School of Communication at Purdue University and I am on Media, Technology and Society track. I am advised by Dr. Jeremy Foote. I study computer-mediated communication, especially using quantitative and computational approaches. I am interested in seeing how people using different affordances on social media to manage their privacy, identity and self-disclosure across platforms. I am also interested in looking at how misinformation spreads on social media.

Before coming to Purdue, I earned my MS degree in Media Science focusing on Marketing Communication Research at Boston University.

Outside research, I like baseball games, foods, traveling and dogs.

Yibin Fan (University of Washington)
Hi ;) I am a first year MA/PhD student in the Department of Communication at University of Washington. My graduate advisor is Professor Benjamin Mako Hill. My research interest is focued on digital group dynamics, and I am deeply curious about questions like how online communities connect and influence each other, or when and why group polarization forms. I am glad to include both quantitive and qualitative methods in my research, and also looking forward to learning more social scientific methods to see whether they make effects in different areas or topics.

Floor Fiers (Northwestern University)



 * Pronouns: they/she

Hi there! I am is a PhD Candidate in the Media, Technology and Society program at Northwestern Uni. Academically speaking, I am interested in the field of digital inequality, particularly as it relates to online labor markets and the gig economy. Outside academia, I love (cold water) swimming and rollerblading, and I find lots of energy in organizing two music & theater festivals in the Netherlands.

Originally from the Netherlands, I first came to the US attend the United World College (Montezuma, NM), after which I pursued a BA in Sociology from St. Lawrence University (Canton, NY). During the pandemic, I worked remotely from the University of Zurich's Internet & Society division. For more background, see my website.

Ryan Funkhouser (Purdue University)
Hey! My name is Ryan Funkhouser, I'm a first year PhD student in the Brian Lamb School of Communication at Purdue University, and I study conflict in communication across difference. In particular, I'm interested in using computational approaches to studying online communities and the ways in which they can foster discourse that reduces incivility and increases understanding across lines of ideological conflict.

Before studying at Purdue, I earned an interdisciplinary humanities MA at Trinity Western University in British Columbia where I studied rhetoric and communication. I also began a second masters, this time specifically in communication, at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

I originally hail from the beautiful city of Bellingham in the PNW, a place which nurtured within me a love for mountains and long-distance trail running. While I am living a relatively mountain-less existence in West Lafayette, Indiana while at Purdue, I continue to find joy in running and finding the beauty in the midwest. When not running, you will likely me and my wife watching a good show or going for walks.

Matt Gaughan (Northwestern University)
I am a first year PhD student in the Technology and Social Behavior program at Northwestern University. I am interested in free and open source software projects and the social organizations/processes/dynamics that shape their production.

Before graduate school, I worked as a software engineer. In my free time, I love going for jogs, reading, and watching movies.

Sohyeon Hwang (Northwestern University)


I'm Sohyeon (she/they), a fifth-year PhD student in the Media, Technology, and Society program at Northwestern University, advised by Aaron Shaw. I study organization, governance, and collaboration online. My research primarily investigates the implications and possibilities of how users interpret, enact, and shape the governance of large-scale digital technologies. In my dissertation work, I focus on how community governance practices (rules, norms, tools) matter for platform-level outcomes we care about e.g., pro-social engagement, online safety, information integrity (looking at platforms like Reddit, Discord, Wikipedia, and Mastodon). I do both computational work and many interview studies. You can find more information at my site.

Dyuti Jha (Purdue university)


Hi there! I am a second year PhD student at the Lamb School at Purdue. Dr Jeremy Foote is my advisor. My interests sit at the intersection of sociology, political science, and communication. My work has largely been qualitative in the past but I currently use a mix of experiments and interviews using computational methods to study organization, aggression, and violence (mostly of political nature) in online communities. I worked in the Indian nonprofit sector for five years before deciding to come back to academia. As I find my way around what other things interest me, you will see them here!

Outside of work, I love playing my ukulele and singing, watching and analyzing trashy films from all over the world, and cooking. You can find more on my website.

Charles Kiene (University of Washington)


I am currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington in Seattle, WA. I am advised by Professor Benjamin Mako Hill. As part of my doctoral research, I study organizational behavior of volunteer-based groups that manage communities in computer-mediated, online settings, such as Discord servers, subreddits, and MMORPG guilds.

Topics include:


 * Massive influxes of newcomers
 * Technological change and adaption
 * Organizational culture and conflicts
 * Emergence and evolution of rules
 * Turnover and division of labor

I use interviewing and ethnographic research methods for inductive qualitative studies of the groups that manage online communities. I also use computational social science methods (programming and maintaining automated web crawling software in SQL databases; machine learning; statistical modeling) for collecting and analyzing data as part of both descriptive and deductive research studies of online communities.

Details at User:Healspersecond

Haomin Lin (University of Washington)


I am an incoming MA/PhD student in the Communication Department at the University of Washington in Seattle, WA. I will be co-advised by Professor Benjamin Mako Hill and Professor Wang Liao. My research interests revolve around uncovering the micro-to-macro linkage in the communication processes in the context of online communication. I am eager to find patterns in processes where micro-level group communications develop to trigger organizational communication behaviors, and finally result in macro-level changes in mass communication.

Prior to joining CDSC, I obtained my M.S. degree from Georgia Tech and worked as a data scientist on generative language models. I look forward to applying computational methods properly to study questions related to communication processes. I am also interested in learning about qualitative methods to research people's exact thoughts on certain topics.

Aside from working and studying, I enjoy my free time through traveling, hiking, and snowboarding (Seattle is a great place for all of them!)

Ellie Ross (University of Washington)


I'm a first year MA/PhD student in the Communication Department at University of Washington, advised by Mako Hill. I have been formerly interested in cultural evolution in the digital age and have done work in the predictive validity of the GRE for PhD students entering the Communication discipline. I am currently researching hierarchical structures of peer production communities using a knowledge production lens.

Before entering grad school I spent my free time with friends, playing video games and watching old tv shows. Now, I spend most of my free time reading books for fun and to fill knowledge gaps. On the weekends, my partner and I try to do something that brings us great joy; usually something with water, nature, and/or with our cats.

Molly de Blanc (Northwestern University)
they/them

I am a first year Ph.D. student in Media, Technology, & Society (MTS). I am advised by Duri Long in the Creative Interfaces Research + Design Studio and participate in the Disability HSR Working Group. Today, I am interested in HCI, phenomenology, and how collectives form, communicate, and practice shared values. I like to think about these things in the context of medical devices, because cyborgs and biohackers are cool. My academic background is in philosophy of science and moral philosophy, and my professional background is in digital rights, education technology, and non-profits.

Emilia Gan (University of Washington)


I'm a PhD candidate in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington (Seattle). My research has involved analyzing data from the Scratch programming platform (Link: paper) and from CodeDay. I am interested in factors that promote longterm participation in coding by newcomers to programming.

Before starting graduate school in CS, I earned an MS (Pathobiology) from UW. I initially started learning how to program with the thought of using these skills for analyzing large biological data sets, but I eventually realized everything I was doing was pointing me away from biology and towards computer science.

Before starting graduate school at UW, I homeschooled with my kids for over a decade, and before that I earned an MD from the University of Massachusetts Medical School and a BS in Materials Science and Engineering from MIT.

Personal Website

Zarine Kharazian (University of Washington)


I am a PhD Student in Human-Centered Design & Engineering at the University of Washington, co-advised by Kate Starbird and Benjamin Mako Hill. My research focuses on how online communities govern and are governed as they navigate disinformation, cyber-enabled influence operations, and related online harms. I am interested in both top-down dynamics – that is, governance by platforms, governments, and international bodies – as well as bottom-up dynamics, the myriad ways online communities experiment with and enact models of self-governance.

In addition to the CDSC, I am also affiliated with the Center for an Informed Public, where I conduct research on disinformation targeting election integrity and conflict situations.

In my free time, I play guitar in several Seattle bands.

You can also find me at zarine.net.

Mad Price Ball (Open Humans Foundation)


I am Executive Director of Open Humans Foundation and co-founder of Open Humans. My research involvement is more "meta" these days: I help others do it. With Open Humans, we try to enable a new approach for research in health and human subjects research, focusing on personal data. Our work is generally "open" and strives to enable peer production, enabling individuals to create and share tools for getting personal data, analyzing it, and potentially contributing it to aggregate projects (from patient groups to citizen scientists, as well as traditional academic studies). I'm also a Shuttleworth Foundation Fellow (alum) and a member of the BoD of MyData Global.

Open Humans was inspired by my dual histories in genomics research and free/open culture. My PhD was in biotech and postdoc work involved running George Church's Personal Genome Project, which invited people to donate genome & health data to science by making it public – where I learned a lot about personal data and human subjects research. I'm also familiar with free/open culture folks for well over a decade, contributing here and there; one of my favorite past projects was helping create an offline copy of Wikipedia for OLPC distributed in Peru & Uruguay (my role was creating the article list, mostly based on traffic & connectivity data).

I live in San Diego, but online you can find me on @madprime on Twitter, in the Open Humans slack group, and sometimes IRC (madprime) – or reach me by email (mad) at openhumans.org.

Tilman Bayer
I am a longtime Wikipedia contributor (as User:HaeB) and editor of the Wikimedia Research Newsletter, a monthly publication surveying and reviewing recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, which I co-founded in 2011 with my then-colleague Dario Taraborelli at the Wikimedia Foundation. I am also one of the two maintainers of the associated @WikiResearch Twitter feed. For the past several years, I have joined Mako, Aaron and others in presenting an annual "State of Wikimedia Research" overview at the Wikimania community conference, where I have also presented on other data and research topics such as the question which parts of a Wikipedia article people actually read.

My work as a data analyst on the Wikimedia Foundation's Product Analytics team included controlled experiments and exploratory data analysis to support the development of new software features for Wikipedia readers and contributors, and the analysis of core readership metrics like pageviews. With the Foundation's web team, I drove the implementation of a new metric designed to better understand reader engagement, based on an instrumentation of time spent on page (dwell time). This became the subject of a research project with Nate TeBlunthuis and my then-colleague Olga Vasileva, with findings e.g. about differences in reading behavior between users in the Global South and the Global North.

My academic background is in pure mathematics, with degrees from the University of Cambridge and the University of Bonn. I am based in San Francisco and can be reached via Gmail ("HaeBwiki") and as "HaeB" on IRC (Freenode).

Regina Cheng (Apple)


I'm a PhD candidate in the Human-Centered Design and Engineering department at University of Washington, co-advised by Mako Hill and Jennifer Turns. I describe my research goal as to understand and support collaborative informal learning in online communities of creators. I am interested in studying how different types of collaborative activities (e.g. feedback exchange, collaborative sense-making) lead to different learning outcomes, and designing for more effective collaboration to facilitate learning. Right now I am especially interested in the domain of data science learning among non-technical population.

Outside research, I like cats, drawing (mostly fanart these days), reading, cooking, hiking, hapkidoing, and preaching about my mother tongue, Hangzhou dialect

Sayamindu Dasgupta (University of Washington)


After getting a PhD from MIT, I was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington's eScience Institute and was hosted by CDSC over 2017-2018. I then spent three and a half years as an assistant professor at the School of Information and Library Science, UNC Chapel Hill, and I am currently an assistant professor the University of Washington's department of Human Centered Design and Engineering where I study, design, and build pathways that engage young people in learning with data and digital technologies. Our lab is called the Learning, Epistemology, and Design Lab (LED Lab).

You can find more about my work on my homepage.

Jaelle Fuchs (University of Zurich)



 * Pronouns: she/her

Hi! My name is Jaelle Fuchs. I am a PhD Student at University of Zurich at Department for Media and Communication Research. I am part of the Internet use and Society division, led my Eszter Hargittai. In my research I am interested in online participation and how it intersects with digital inequalities. Particularly, how digital inequalities can affect online participation at different levels and across platforms.

I studied Media and Communication with minors in both political science and philosophy of religion for my BA at the Universtiy of Zurich. For my MA I joined the Internet and Society Master’s program.

I am based in Switzerland and during my BA and MA I worked as a receptionist at a small hotel in the Swiss mountains, so if you ever need some travel tips for Switzerland feel free to reach out. If you want to know more about me, my research and how to get in touch here’s my website.

Bastian Greshake Tzovaras (Turing Institute)


Despite having an academic background in biology/bioinformatics, I've been active in peer-produced citizen science since around 2011. I'm one of the co-founders of the crowdsourced, open data repository openSNP, which collects personal genomics data sets from users of Direct-To-Consumer genetic testing companies to put them into the public domain. Since 2017 I'm also the Director of Research for Open Humans (https://www.openhumans.org), an ecosystem for participatory citizen science that aims to allow people to analyze and learn from their own personal data as well as given members the opportunity to share their data with (citizen science) research projects. Among other things we have piloted a JupyterHub-based approach to give people their own virtual machines that allow them to write, run and share data analysis notebooks without having to share any personal information (see ).

Since 2019 I'm a research fellow at the Center for Research & Interdisciplinarity in Paris, where I will study how the ideas of peer-production can be translated to facilitate co-created citizen science projects in which participants are fully involved in all stages of research, from start to finish. Lately a lot of focus there has been on how we can scale up the individualistic quantified self experiments people do to larger cohorts. I also teach students the basics of citizen science and self-tracking.

Last but not least I'm involved in community building and mentoring in bioinformatics and for open projects in general: I'm a board member of the Open Bioinformatics Foundation, have mentored for Mozilla's Open Leadership Cohorts, Outreachy & Google Summer of Code.

Andrés Monroy-Hernández (Snap Research)


I'm a researcher at Snap Inc. and an affiliate faculty at the University of Washington. My work focuses on the study and design of social computing systems. Some areas I've worked on are crowdsourcing, peer production, remixing, civic tech, urban computing, and online learning.

Some projects I've worked on lately include Calendar.help, a hybrid intelligence scheduling assistant partly powered by crowds; Narcotweets, a research project studying how people use social media during war and political uprisings; and the Scratch Online Community, a website where millions of young people learn to program and remix games and animations.

You can find me at @andresmh or at www.andresmh.com.

Jonathan T. Morgan (Crowdstrike)


I'm a UX researcher at CrowdStrike and an affiliate faculty member in the UW department of Human Centered Design & Engineering. Most of my research involves understanding the sociotechnical mechanisms through which people who use complex collaborative software systems coordinate their work across time and space. You can find out more about me and my work here and here.

I am a founding mentor for the Community Data Science Workshops, and I also develop and teach UW courses on related topics, like Human Centered Data Science.

I am a voracious and omnivorous reader, and a passionately amateurish musician. When I'm away from the keyboard, you can usually find me exploring the beaches and forests of Puget Sound with my wife and my dog, Ozymandias.

Nick Vincent (Simon Fraser)
My research focuses on studying the relationships between human-generated data and computing technologies to mitigate negative impacts of these technologies. I am especially interested in research that (1) makes people aware of the value of their data and (2) helps people leverage the value of their data. My work relates to concepts such as "data dignity", "data as labor", "data leverage", and "data dividends".

Here's my website!

Morten Warncke-Wang (Wikimedia Foundation)


I've been participating in online and peer production communities for over 20 years, and recently (December 2016) got a PhD studying them. My research focus has been on content quality in peer production communities like Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap: what is high quality content, how is it created, can we build tools to judge it, and is it produced where there is demand for it? In addition to research publications, this work has also led to a Python library for predicting Wikipedia article quality (articlequality) that is publicly available on Wikipedia through the ORES API. I am also a Research Fellow with the Wikimedia Foundation's Research group.

Another one of my interests is using recommender systems to help contributors find work to do. In Wikipedia this manifests in my maintenance of SuggestBot. The bot can recommend articles to work on based on a user's edit history, or they can supply articles or categories they want to base the suggestions on. SuggestBot is currently available in seven languages.

I've participated as a mentor and instructor in some of the Community Data Science Workshops. Apart from these things, I also like reading (both books and magazines), watching movies, playing squash, and attempting to make music.

Alice Ferrazzi


I'm a researcher and community member who collaborates and helps the CDSC in various ways. My research work focuses on the study of operating systems kernel where I work mostly in live patch systems. One of my projects is Elivepatch.

I'm the Gentoo Kernel Project Leader, mainly focused in kernel release automatization. You can find me at @aliceinwire or at www.aliceinwire.net. My Gentoo profile is at User:Aliceinwire. I am on IRC (OFTC) as alicef_.

Samuel Klein
I'm a wikimedian, urban spelunker, and founding member of MIT's Knowledge Futures Group. One of my projects is the Innovation Information Initiative, a data collab for patent and prior art datasets.

Occasionally in IRC as _sj_. Sj (talk) 15:54, 17 August 2019 (EDT)

Abel Serrano Juste


Interested in how technology can serve communities of people for good. I see free software as an implicit requirement for this.

I've been working for two years in the University Complutense of Madrid doing data analysis on collaborative online communities (CBPP), more specifically, on wikis. You can see my publications and more info about me in my homepage.

I hold a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science by the UCM and currently I'm enrolled in a Master's Degree of Data Science by the UOC.

Also, I like bikes, nature, hiking, traveling, and sharing my life with beautiful people.

Kat Walsh (Creative Commons)


I'm a lawyer working in copyright, speech, policy, and nonprofit leadership around various Free and Open projects and communities, currently working with individual clients including Creative Commons. I got into open communities through volunteering for Wikimedia, first as an editor, then in community dispute resolution, and then as a board member for several years. I've also been on the board of the Free Software Foundation.

I enjoy collaborating with academic researchers on work in peer production communities and their copyright/"intellectual property", dispute resolution, governance, and legal policy issues. I am located just north of San Francisco, where I enjoy playing my bassoon, viola, and occasionally some other things in a delightfully weird collection of musical groups, and lifting heavy objects for no particular reason.

Hong Qu
I'm a PhD candidate at the Network Science Institute in Northeastern University. I try to analyze and understand how social networks facilite collective action, proprogate beliefs, and influence public opinion. For my Masters degree, I studied HCI and NLP with Professor Marti Hearst at UC Berkeley's School of Information, and developed a passion for user-centered design.

Although I am working with a lot of graph data (and hairball visualizations), I really miss qualitative user research such as contextual inquiry and unstructured interviewers, and hope to conduct more mix methods studies as much as I can in the future.

Phoebe Ayers
I am your very unofficial librarian! You have official librarians at your respective institutions, but I am happy to be your unofficial one and help if I can. Also, I am a very long term Wikimedian. Also, I am a UW iSchool grad, but from a long time ago!

I'm currently the librarian for computer science, electrical engineering and math at MIT, where I also work with researchers on managing their research data (saving, storing and sharing it) and open access publication. I have been a Wikipedian since 2003, working on English Wikipedia but also other Wikimedia projects. I have also been involved in governance of the Wikimedia Foundation; I served on the Board of Trustees from 2010-2015 and am currently on the board of the Wikimedia Endowment. I have also had a long-time hand in running our annual conference Wikimania as well as lots of other events. I care a lot about citations and making sure that studies using Wikipedia specify what language version they are studying. Also, I once claimed to know How Wikipedia Works, which let's be honest, is a bit of a reach.

Alumni
As some of these folks have moved on, some of these biographies are a bit of date!

Stefania Druga


I'm a first-year Ph.D. student in the Information School at the University of Washington, co-advised by Jason Yip and Alexis Hiniker. I am the co-founder of Cognimates and HacKIDemia. My research focuses on how children interact with and make sense of the growing collection of “smart” inter-connected playthings in the world around them together with their parents. I am exploring how families, as they play with these new smart assistants and applications, develop new ways of thinking about intelligence, emotion, and social interaction. Based on these studies, I am designing new tools and activities to introduce families to machine learning and data science in a playful way.

Outside research, I like climbing, dogs, reading, dancing and learning new languages.

Wm Salt Hale (University of Washington)


Growing up in Seattle during the early 90s offered many technological opportunities, most of which I took advantage of. As an avid GNU/Linux user for over 20 years, I have been exposed to numerous technology orientated communities on various levels.

During high school I entered the Running Start program, completing an Associate's degree in Computer Science from South Seattle College. After which I transfered to the University of Washington, pursuing the same major. It was not a fit, instead I developed a number of businesses, traveled, and spoke at various conferences, conventions, events, faires, and festivals.

Upon returning to the University of Washington to complete my Bachelor's degree in Communication, I connected with Mako and was shown a world of academia previously unimagined. After another year of traveling, I have decided to return to the UW Department of Comm yet again and am just beginning to delve deeper into the intersection of Technology and Society in the MA/PhD program.

I am extremely interested in: Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) and Culture; Hackers, Makers, and Breakers; and Computer-Mediated Communication using real-time synchronous systems. Along with numerous hobbies including: urban hiking (walking), dancing (folk, east coast swing, lindy, blues), windsports (windsurfing, kiteboarding, sailing), bicycling, boffering, cooking, driving, event planning, gaming, programming, public speaking, reading, robotics, skiing, and travel.

Up to date information and links to various profiles around the web can be found on my IndieWeb presence, The Alt World of Salt.

Sejal Khatri


I recently graduated from the Information School at the University of Washington, Seattle. My specialization was in User Experience Research and Design in the Information Management program at iSchool. I did my undergrad in Computer Science at SPPU in Pune, India, and then interned for Wikimedia Foundation as a UX Engineer. My current research interests revolve around online communities, peer-production, and open source software. When I'm not working, I participate in design jams and hackathons where I get the opportunity to turn curiosities and concerns into design interventions.

Jim Maddock (Northwestern)


I'm a PhD Student in the Computer Science and Communications departments at Northwestern University. I currently work with Darren Gergle and Aaron Shaw, studying collaboration and coordination dynamics within social computing systems, such as Wikipedia and Zooniverse. Throughout my tenure as a graduate student I've also interned at MSR India, Google, and Mozilla.

I first became interested in HCI during my undergraduate degree at the University of Washington. I earned a degree in Human Centered Design and Engineering, where I worked with Professor Kate Starbird to understand rumoring behavior in crisis situations. I also studied Medieval European history.

When I'm not working on research, I'm probably riding my bike or planning a backpacking trip. You can find more about my research at my website.

Sneha Narayan (Carleton College)
I'm an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Carleton College. Before that, I did my PhD in the Technology and Social Behavior program at Northwestern University, advised by Aaron Shaw (whose bio you can find by scrolling up a couple of sections). I grew up in Bangalore, India, studied mathematics at Oberlin College, and received a masters degree in Sociology and Social Anthropology from Central European University, Budapest.

I've spent many years living in housing co-ops, and volunteering on the boards of co-operative organizations. My involvement in the co-op movement led to my interest in learning more (and producing knowledge) about participatory, volunteer-run endeavors such as peer production projects and online collaboration communities. My research focuses on understanding how newcomers join and become embedded in volunteer-run organizations, and what kinds of technological interventions might affect their continued participation in these communities. For (slightly) more information about all this, you can check out my homepage.

Current Undergraduate Research Assistants

 * Carolyn Zou, Northwestern University
 * Aaron Phan, University of Washington

Alum Research Assistants

 * Marlene Alanis, Northwestern University
 * Gabrielle Alava, Northwestern University
 * Zach Arenson, University of Washington
 * Lucy Bao, University of Washington
 * Bella Brown, University of Washington
 * Marianne Cano, Northwestern University
 * Frank Chen, University of Washington
 * Katie Chen, Northwestern University
 * Paz Baum, Northwestern University
 * Dylan Griffin, Northwestern University
 * Xinya (Cindy) Gong, University of Washington
 * Amy Guo, Northwestern University
 * Jacinta Harsh, University of Washington
 * Noah Hellyer, University of Washington
 * Matthew Holleran-Meyer, Northwestern University
 * Monica Kent, University of Washington
 * Aidan Klinges, Northwestern University
 * Laura (Alia) Levi, University of Washington
 * Siying Luo, Northwestern University
 * Daryn McElroy, Northwestern University
 * Nicole McGinnis, University of Washington
 * Serene Ong, Northwestern University
 * Eric Rosin, Northwestern University
 * Caroline Rygg, University of Washington
 * Raina Sadhan, University of Washington
 * Divya Sikka, Interlake High School
 * Donny Tou, Northwestern University
 * Davida Yalley, Northwestern University
 * Olivia Yan, University of Washington
 * Hannah Yang, Northwestern University
 * Grace Zhu, Northwestern University
 * Emily Zou, Northwestern University