People

We're an interdisciplinary group at Carleton College, Northwestern University, Purdue University and the University of Washington. 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 here.

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!).

Shorter summaries of research interests are also available.

Sayamindu Dasgupta (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)


I grew up in the city of Kolkata, India. At some point in school I wanted to study Physics, but then soon after, I came across computers, which messed up my plans considerably. Roughly 9 years after I had my first encounter with a com­puter, I read Sey­mour Papert’s Mind­storms: Chil­dren, Com­put­ers and Pow­er­ful Ideas, and a year after that, I found myself at the MIT Media Lab, as a grad­u­ate stu­dent in a research group that, among other things, continue the work Sey­mour and his colleagues had started many years ago.

After getting a PhD from MIT, I was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington's eScience Institute and was hosted by the Department of Communication. Currently, I am an assistant professor at the School of Information and Library Science, UNC Chapel Hill, where I study, design, and build pathways that engage young people in learning with data. I also do a considerable amount of learning with data myself, where I use (mostly) quantitative methods to study how children and youth learn in large-scale informal online communities.

You can find more about my work on my homepage.

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 peer production rarely works and that getting it to work remained much more art than science. After being talked into the idea that academia was the right place to fix this by Eric von Hippel, I've devoted the last decade of my life to trying to contribute to an emerging science of Internet-based collaborative production. Since starting as an academic, I have published tens of thousand of articles—nearly all of them are the.

In the more boring accounting (which I've copied and pasted from elsewhere): I am an Assistant Professor in the University of Washington Department of Communication and an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the departments of Human-Centered Design and Engineering and Computer Science and Engineering. I am a member of Community Data Science Collective which I founded with Aaron Shaw. 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.

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.

Aaron Shaw (Northwestern University)


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).

Molly de Blanc (Northwestern University)
I do communications, outreach, and research support for CDSC. This means that, among other things, I think about how our work can help the communities we study and other online communities. My CDSC research is about how community values are embodied in policies and rules.

Before joining CDSC, I worked in open education and free and open source software. I am concurrently studying bioethics at New York University where I work on the public health impact of technologies. My thesis is on consent, right to repair, and implanted medical devices.

I spend most of my time reading, but sometimes I write and play music, hang out with my cat, ride a bike, and swim. I wrote The Declaration of Digital Autonomy with Karen Sandler.

I can be reached at molly [dot] deblanc [at] northwestern [dot] edu.

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.

Regina Cheng (University of Washington)


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

Stefania Druga (University of Washington)


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.

Floor Fiers (Northwestern University)



 * Pronouns: they/she

Hi there! I am is a PhD student 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 spend way too much time on 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.

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

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 Batchelor'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.

Sohyeon Hwang (Northwestern University)


I'm Sohyeon (she/they), a third-year PhD student in the Media, Technology, and Society program at Northwestern University, advised by Aaron Shaw. My research interests broadly circle around online governance, mostly around ideas of heterogeneity, scale, and polycentric + decentralized models. I focus on the complexities arising in governance, such as how online groups diversely interpret, innovate beyond, subvert, and co-opt socio-technical affordances to manage themselves.

I am pretty methods-agnostic, doing both computational/quantitative approaches as well as qualitative work here and there. You can find more information at my site.

Outside of work, I like to eat french fries (love poutine) and take (blurry but not by choice) film photos.

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

Nick Vincent (Northwestern University)
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!

Serene Ong (Northwestern University)
I am a current junior at Northwestern studying Cognitive Science with a concentration in Artificial Intelligence as well as Psychology and minoring in Computer Science. I'm interested in understanding the motivations behind human decision making and why there tends to be consistent patterns of irrationality. I plan on entering the consulting field post graduation. Outside of school I like to crotchet, watch nature documentaries, and explore Chicago!

Donny Tou (Northwestern University)
Hi everyone! I'm Donny (he/him), a soon-to-be sophomore at Northwestern studying Social Policy and Economics with a certificate in Civic Engagement. I am fascinated by human organization – specifically how formal institutions through which to pursue cooperative action are born despite the unpredictability of human decision-making. I have some experience with projects focusing on participatory budgeting processes and qualitative policy research, and I'm hoping to further immerse myself in the quantitative component of the social sciences in the future. Outside of school, you'll probably find me longboarding or marveling at nature (or both!).

Research Assistants

 * Marlene Alanis, Northwestern University
 * Paz Baum, Northwestern University
 * Dylan Griffin, Northwestern University
 * Amy Guo, Northwestern University
 * Noah Hellyer, University of Washington
 * Joshua Hong, Northwestern University
 * Eric Rosin, Northwestern University
 * Davida Yalley, Northwestern University
 * Grace Zhu, Northwestern University
 * Carolyn Zou, Northwestern University
 * Emily Zou, Northwestern University

Alums

 * Daryn McElroy, Northwestern University
 * Matthew Holleran-Meyer, Northwestern University
 * Gabrielle Alava, University of Washington

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).

Bastian Greshake Tzovaras (Center for Research & Interdisciplinarity, Université Paris Descartes)


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.

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.

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.

Kat Walsh


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.

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.