Team
 Director and Principal Investigator Ethan Zuckerman, Director of the Center, is cofounder of the citizen media community of Global Voices. Prior to MIT, Ethan worked with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University on projects focused on civic media, freedom of speech online, and understanding media ecosystems. He led a team focused on Media Cloud, a project that builds an archive of news stories and blog posts applies language processing and presents ways to analyze and visualize the resulting data. Zuckerman also founded Geekcorp, a non-profit technology volunteer corps that has done work in over a dozen countries, and helped found Tripod, an early participatory media company. |
 Assistant Director Lorrie LeJeune is Assistant Director of the Center, to which she brings a diverse background in science, technology, and publishing. Lorrie began her career in pharmaceutical development, but her fascination with writing, editing, illustration and Macintosh computers eventually led her into a career in publishing at the MIT Press, the University of Michigan Press, and O'Reilly Media, where she spent nearly nine years as a product manager, editor, and cover illustrator. In past incarnations Lorrie was the program manager at France Telecom's R&D lab in Cambridge, MA; the managing director of OpenWetWare, a wiki dedicated to open sharing of information in science; and most recently, senior editor at Scitable, Nature Publishing Group's online library for science education. |
 Principal Investigator Mitchel Resnick, Professor of Learning Research at the MIT Media Laboratory, develops new technologies that engage children in creative learning experiences, opening new opportunities for children to express themselves and actively participate in their communities. Resnick’s research group developed Scratch, an innovative software tool that makes it easy for children to create their own interactive stories, games, and animations -- and share their creations on the web. Resnick also co-founded the Computer Clubhouse project, an international network of after-school centers where youth from low-income communities learn to express themselves creatively with new technologies. Resnick earned a B.A. in physics at Princeton University (1978), and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science at MIT (1988, 1992). He worked for five years as a science-technology journalist for Business Week magazine. |
 Assistant Professor of Civic Media and Co-Principal Investigator Twittter: @schock Sasha Costanza-Chock is a researcher and mediamaker who works on civic media, the political economy of communication, and the transnational movement for media justice and communication rights. He is currently Assistant Professor of Civic Media at MIT's Comparative Media Studies program (http://cms.mit.edu), and is a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. He sits on the board of Allied Media Projects (http://alliedmedia.org), and is a cofounder of VozMob (http://vozmob.net), among other projects. For more info see http://schock.cc. |
 Research Assistant, Comparative Media Studies Alexandre Goncalves is a Brazilian Science reporter. He worked for O Estado de S. Paulo newspaper covering biotechnology and science policy. Before becoming a journalist, he worked as an information architect at many software companies. He is interested in issues such as democracy in the digital era, social implications of new media, and communication activism to promote social reform. These interests are fueled by his experience in the media and his knowledge of information technology. |
 Communications Director Andrew conducts the communications efforts for CMS (websites, press relations, and project and event publicity) as well as those for MIT's Center for Civic Media and the MIT Game Lab. A native of Washington, D.C., he holds a degree in communication from Wake Forest University and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Emerson College. His marketing and P.R. skills were honed at Houghton Mifflin and Tufts University. He was also the long-time fiction editor for Identity Theory and followed up with a literary tool website, called Readsfeed. |
 Codesign Facilitator and Community Organizer Becky is the Codesign Facilitator and Community Organizer at the Center. She spends her time with changemakers of many kinds codesigning tools and methods to leverage media and technology for equitable social change. Prior to joining the Center, she led the SaferMobile project at MobileActive, a program to educate and train activists, journalists, and human rights defenders in mobile phone security. An activist and a journeyer, Becky has lived domestically and internationally working in the field of ICTD and as a photographer. She is particularly dedicated to the demystification of technology and the democratization of technology creation and use. Becky holds a B.S. in Comparative Media Studies from MIT and an M.S. in Information Management and Systems from the UC Berkeley iSchool. |
 Fellow Benjamin Mako Hill is an scholar, activist, and consultant working on issues of technology and society. He is currently a researcher and Ph.D. Candidate in a joint program between the MIT Sloan School of Management and the MIT Media Lab, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and a Research Fellow at the MIT Center for Civic Media. His research focuses on sociological analyses of social structure in free culture and free software communities. He has been an leader, developer, and contributor to the Free and Open Source Software community for more than a decade as part of the Debian and Ubuntu projects. He is the author of several best-selling technical books, and a member of the Free Software Foundation board of directors. He is an advisor to the Wikimedia Foundation and the One Laptop per Child project. Hill as a Masters degree from the MIT Media Lab. |
 Research Assistant Catherine D’Ignazio, a.k.a. kanarinka, is an artist, software developer and educator. She is the Director of the Institute for Infinitely Small Things, an interventionist performance troupe, and former Director of the Experimental Geography Research Cluster at RISD’s Digital+Media MFA program. She has also taught in the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT since 2009. Her artwork has been exhibited at the ICA Boston, Eyebeam, and MASSMoCA, and has won awards from the Tanne Foundation and Turbulence.org. Catherine has a BA in International Relations from Tufts University (Summa Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa) and an MFA in Studio Art from Maine College of Art. She has lived and worked in Paris, Buenos Aires, and Michigan, and currently resides in Waltham, MA. At the lab, Catherine is interested in researching experimental ways of engaging more deeply with place and spatial justice issues - through storytelling, maps, media, social practice and algorithms. |
 PhD student in Media Arts and Sciences at the MIT Media Lab Charlie is a graduate student in the Speech + Mobility group. |
 Research Assistant, Comparative Media Studies Chris Peterson joins CMS on leave from MIT's Office of Undergraduate Admissions, where he spent three years directing digital strategy and communications. In addition to overseeing all web and new media activities for MITAdmissions, Chris liaised with FIRST Robotics and had a special focus on subaltern, disadvantaged, and first-generation applicants. Before MIT Chris worked as a research assistant at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School and as a Senior Campus Rep for Apple. He currently serves on the Board of Directors of the National Coalition Against Censorship, as a Fellow at the National Center for Technology and Dispute Resolution, and as the sole proprietor of BurgerMap.org. He holds a B.A. in Critical Legal Studies from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he completed his senior thesis on Facebook privacy under Professors Ethan Katsh and Alan Gaitenby. He is interested generally in how people communicate within digitally mediated spaces and occasionally blogs at cpeterson.org. |
 Research Assistant, Comparative Media Studies A West Coast girl at heart, Denise Cheng comes to MIT from all over. Her background is a mix of journalism, media empowerment and community building, including as a Peace Corps volunteer and the citizen journalism coordinator for The Rapidian, a hyperlocal based in Grand Rapids, Mich. She has long examined the rise of participatory media and its implications for journalism and also explored civic media off the Web, from low power FM to digital storytelling and the Indy Media movement. Denise is drawn to neighborhoods, design and coding, languages, civic empowerment, DIY and handmade media. You can find out more about her and keep up with her at her blog. |
 Civic Technology Programmer Edward is a Civic Technology Programmer at the Center for Civic Media. He creates and maintains digital tools for enabling civic engagement and media participation. Prior to joining the Center, Edward worked as a consultant on web development and civic technology projects in Detroit, MI. He is also a cofounder of the i3 Detroit hackerspace, and the lead developer of the Seltzer CRM hackerspace management tool. His other interests include technology-based art, machine learning, and neuroscience. Edward holds bachelor's degrees in Computer Science and Physics from MIT and a master's degree in Applied Math from the University of Waterloo. He maintains a project blog at elplatt.com and can be found on Twitter as @EdwardLPlatt. |
 Visiting Professor of Rhetoric and Media Studies Visiting from the University of Minnesota, Edward Schiappa conducts research in argumentation, classical rhetoric, media influence, and contemporary rhetorical theory. His current research explores the scope and function of rhetorical studies, including the relationship between rhetorical theory and critical media studies. He has published 10 books and his research has appeared in such journals as Philosophy & Rhetoric, Quarterly Journal of Speech, Rhetoric Review, Argumentation, Communication Monographs, and Communication Theory. He has served as editor of Argumentation and Advocacy and received NCA's Douglas W. Ehninger Distinguished Rhetorical Scholar Award in 2000 and the Rhetorical and Communication Theory Distinguished Scholar Award in 2006. He was named a National Communication Association Distinguished Scholar in 2009. He now holds the Paul W. Frenzel Chair of Liberal Arts in the University of Minnesota's Department of Communications Studies, where he teaches graduate courses on contemporary rhetorical theory, critical communication studies, rhetorical criticism, and popular culture criticism. |
 Research Assistant Erhardt Graeff is a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab and MIT Center for Civic Media, studying information flows across mainstream and social media, and exploring technologies that help entrepreneurs from marginalized groups, especially youth, to be greater agents of change. Erhardt is the Co-Founder of BetterGrads, an online college mentoring program for high school students, a founding trustee of The Awesome Foundation, which gives small grants to awesome projects, and a founding member of the Web Ecology Project, a network of social media and internet culture researchers. He holds an MPhil in Modern Society and Global Transformations from the University of Cambridge and B.S. degrees in Information Technology and International Studies from Rochester Institute of Technology. Twitter: @erhardt |
 Director of MIT Mobile Experience Lab Federico Casalegno, is the Director of the MIT Mobile Experience Lab and Associate Director of the MIT Design Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His lab has developed Locast, an open source, flexible and cutting-edge location-based platform that combines distributed Web and Mobile applications that create hyperlocal and highly-connected experiences. Locast superimposes layers of collectively generated information within the physical space. This augmentation of space is democratically chosen by Locast users, in real time, as they participate in the content-generation process. Within Locast, the interconnection between content, spaces and people is simultaneous and ubiquitous. |
 Research Assistant, MIT Media Lab Center for Civic Media At the Center for Civic Media, I make art, software and social processes which empower people to become more creative, more effective, and more informed. My recent projects include the Festival of Learning, research on gender representation in the news, and tablet tech for social checkups. I'm an intentional polymath and range widely across the arts, tech, charities, ideas, and education. Before MIT, I worked in UK startups SwiftKey, Dressipi, and Texperts, developing technologies used by millions of people worldwide. I also helped start the Ministry of Stories, a creative writing center in East London. I was a Davies-Jackson Scholar at the University of Cambridge from 2006-2008. |
 Fellow Jeffrey designs maps visual programming environments and other stuff at the MIT Media Lab's Design Ecology group. |
 Professor of Chinese Cultural Studies Professor Jing Wang received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Soon to join MIT’s Comparative Media Studies, she also serves as the Director of the Institute of Civic Media and Communication at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China. Wang is the founder and organizer of New Media Action Lab (NMAL) and serves as the Chair of the Advisory Board of while sitting on the Advisory Board of Wikimedia Foundation. In spring 2009 she launched an NGO 2.0 project (“Chinese NGOs in the Web 2.0 Environment") undertaken in collaboration with two Chinese universities, Ogilvy & Mather China, and three Chinese NGO partner organizations. Professor Wang published several books and articles, among them, the award-winning The Story of Stone, High Culture Fever, and the editor of Locating China: Space, Place, and Popular Culture, Popular Culture and the Chinese State, China’s Avant-Garde Fiction, Cinema and Desire (with Tani Barlow). Her current research interests include advertising and marketing, civic media and communication, social media action research, pop culture, and nonprofit technology, with an area focus on the People’s Republic of China. Her book Brand New China: Advertising, Media, and Commercial Culture is available from Harvard University Press. |
 Visiting Professor Kate Crawford is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, a Visiting Professor at the MIT Center for Civic Media and a Senior Fellow at the Information Law Institute at NYU. Over the last ten years she has researched the social, political and cultural contexts of networked technologies. Her current work focuses on a range of data practices, from the ethics of big data, crisis informatics, networked journalism, and the everyday uses of mobile and social media. She has conducted large and small-scale ethnographic studies in Australia, India and the US. Previously, she was the Deputy Director of the Journalism and Media Research Centre at the University of New South Wales, and a founding member of the Media and Communications Department at the University of Sydney. |
 Researcher Leo Burd is a researcher with the Center for Civic Media, where he is developing novel technologies and approaches to bridge the digital divide and foster social empowerment. Leo is particularly interested in the design of innovative phone, web and mapping applications to support youth participation, social inclusion and local civic engagement. Prior to joining the Center, Leo was part of Microsoft's Global Learning Research team, directed a non-profit organization that built "computer and citizenship schools" in Sao Paulo slums and was involved in a variety of projects that used technology to improve quality of life in different parts of the world. |
 Luisa loves stories. Stories conveyed through words, numbers, audio and visuals. She likes to think about how those stories are told and how to involve more people in the process. She grew up in Germany and California. During and after her undergraduate years at UC Berkeley, she worked in Chennai, Goettingen, Munich, Duesseldorf and New York. She’s most recently made her home in Somerville and you can find her studying and making maps, audio documentaries, designing workshops, asking Python questions on Stackoverflow or scoping out community art projects. |
 Research Assistant Matt's a Research Assistant at the Center. He has spent his career at the intersection of technology and social change. He graduated with high honors from the University of Maryland College Park, where he wrote a thesis on the disruptive role of political blogs in journalism. He went on to join the strategy team at EchoDitto, a boutique consulting firm building cool technology for nonprofits, startups, and socially responsible businesses. Then Matt attempted to save democracy by directing new media at Americans for Campaign Reform, a bi-partisan grassroots effort to enact voluntary public financing of federal campaigns. Right before Citizens United v. FEC hit, he joined the New Organizing Institute, where he helped to train the next generation of organizers. For most of this time, he also ran one of the most popular NetSquared groups in the world. Matt's interested in pretty much everything, particularly the everything taking place at the Media Lab. |
 Research Assistant, Comparative Media Studies Molly Sauter grew up in Bucks County, PA, and has lived, variously, in Annapolis, MD, Austin, TX, and Somerville, MA. She studied Philosophy and the History and Philosophy of Science at St John’s College and the University of Pittsburgh, where she was a Brackenridge Fellow. Before arriving at MIT, she worked as a researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, and as a freelance narrative designer and game critic in the indie game scene. Molly’s research focuses on cultural and socio-political analyses of technology, particularly hacktivist and other political technologies exported across cultural lines. She also nurses interests in digital poetry, science and technology in popular culture, the HCI of information security, and remix aesthetics. She can be found on Twitter @oddletters and occasionally blogging at oddletters.com. |
 Visiting Scholar Nick Grossman is a technologist & entrepreneur focused on the intersection of the web and urban, social, and civic systems. For the past 10 years, he has developed software and media products, advocacy efforts and internet-based businesses that help cities and the internet work better together. He is currently the “Activist in Residence” at Union Square Ventures, where he works on public policy and regulatory issues facing “peer networks” on the web, and leads advocacy initiatives that support web-based innovation. Previously, Nick led an incubator for technology & media initiatives at OpenPlans -- producing advocacy media properties focused on urban policy, building web applications to spark engagement in local civic issues, and building open source and open data businesses serving the public sector. He is also an advisor to Code for America. You can find nick on twitter at @nickgrossman and blogging at The Slow Hunch. (photo by Joi Ito) |
 Visiting Scientist Pablo is visiting scientist at the Center for Civic Media. He takes part and develops his projects in several independent research groups such as: Basurama (Trash-o-rama), where he has developed 6000km.org, a project that, through geotagged information, researches about the landscapes that the Spanish real estate crisis has left behind; Meipi, which develops the open source software meipi.org for participatory mapping; Kulturometer.org, that researches about cultural expenses in Madrid Region; Montera34, a research group that develops organization and visualization tools such as newspaper surface coverage. He is now developing PageOneX, a tool to track news in newspaper front pages. He holds a Master in Architecture by the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid. He has also studied in the Technische Universität Dresden in Germany.
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 Research Specialist Rahul Bhargava creates playful websites, explanatory data visualizations, award-winning educational museum exhibits, and interactive robots. He has led workshops on a number of topics across three continents, leading to a special interest in finding ways to build technologies and experiences that meet the disparate needs of varying communities and cultures. Rahul is currently working on a variety of technologies to support community building and civic engagement. |
 Research Assistant, Comparative Media Studies Rodrigo is a Research Assistant at MIT’s Center for Civic Media and an MS student in the Comparative Media Studies program. His research interests include the impact of social media on political discourse, crowdsourcing and political participation, ICT4D and user-led service design. Rodrigo works with the crisis mapping initiative Standby Task Force and is a policy advisor to the UK-based civic crowdfunding platform Spacehive. Before joining the Center Rodrigo was based in Mumbai where he was a co-founding editor of Conde Nast India's digital editorial business. Previously he was a journalist at the BBC and Bloomberg News, and holds a B.A. in History and Politics from Oxford University. |
 Research Assistant, Comparative Media Studies Twitter: @Tochtli_exe As a scholar in the Ronald E. McNair Post Baccalaureate Achievement Program, Rogelio has conducted research regarding the use of new media among Latina/o activists in Los Angeles. Emphasizing a "from-the-ground-up" approach to scholarship and civic engagement, Rogelio has been involved with integrating media and technology into social justice geared movements. His work looks into lessening educational and health related disparities among historically underrepresented and underserved communities. Past examples of such fusion between media and public service include his involvement with the Fast for Our Future, a human rights focused hunger strike that utilized a new media campaign, and the South Central Farmers Health and Education Fund, which aims to provide low income communities with affordable organic produce and essential dietary education with the assistance of new media. Rogelio will work closely with the Center for Civic Media to further develop the use of technology and media as a means of addressing societal disparities, with an emphasis on ensuring access to emerging technology, media, and digital information among communities that often fall victim to the "digital divide." |
 Research Assistant, Comparative Media Studies Sun Huan is a graduate student at Comparative Media Studies and research assistant at Center for Civic Media of MIT. She received a B.A. in Journalism from Tsinghua University, Beijing. Her research interest lies in the rise of digital media and its socio-political implications on China. She is closely involved with NGO2.0 Project, which aims to build up Chinese grassroots NGOs' digital literacy. Her undergraduate thesis quantitatively examines Chinese college students' use of social media and their political participation. |
 Professor of Comparative Media Studies William Uricchio is Professor and Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program and Professor of Comparative Media History at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. He has held visiting professorships at Stockholm University, the Freie Universität Berlin, and Philips Universität Marburg; and Guggenheim, Fulbright and Humboldt fellowships have supported his research. Uricchio considers the interplay of media technologies and cultural practices, and their role in (re-) constructing representation, knowledge and publics. In part, he researches and develops new histories of 'old' media (early photography, telephony, film, broadcasting, and new media) when they were new. And in part, he investigates the interactions of media cultures and their audiences through research into such areas as peer-to-peer communities and cultural citizenship, media and cultural identity, and historical representation in computer games and reenactments. |
 Research Affiliate I am an organic chat client, spanning a multitude of subcultures and putting like-minded (but differently disciplined) people in touch. Many of these connections are made at events I co-organize and facilitate like Random Hacks of Kindness, SpaceApps Challenge, Konbit Technologie (the first hackathon to ever take place IN Haiti), H4D2, and #EveryoneHacks. I am a co-founder and current board member of Jigsaw Renaissance, a learning and making community in Seattle; co-founder and past director of Space Federation, linking together hacker and maker spaces; and current director Geeks Without Bounds. GWOB is an accelerator for humanitarian projects, and deployed with the FEMA Innovation Team for Hurricane Sandy response. 2013 brings the new adventure of researching how decentralized groups scale at MIT's Center for Civic Media. Find this robot just about anywhere as willowbl00. |
 Director of Crónicas de Héroes/Hero Reports Yesica, a researcher in urban design with a master's degree in Architecture and Urbanism from MIT, devotes most of her research in border issues between Mexico and the United States. She challenges the notion of pair-cities as separate entities, instead looking at them through a unilateral lens where the conflict manifested in opposing relations between needs, values, interest, and concerns of the two different entities can become the tool for negotiation among multiple systems. Following her graduation from MIT, Ms. Guerra was granted an Internship at UNESCO’s headquarters; in this organization, Ms. Guerra collaborated in the creation of a toolkit/guide for social and spatial inclusion for international migrants. Currently, Yesica is the Director of Crónicas de Héroes/Hero Reports and Research Affiliate of the Center for Civic Media. |
ALUMNI
 Former Director/Principal Investigator Chris Csikszentmihályi co-founded the Center and became its Director in 2009. Csikszentmihályi also founded the MIT Media Lab's Computing Culture group, known for developing political technologies that rebalance power between citizens, corporations, and governments. Trained as an artist, he has worked in the intersection of new technologies, media, information activism and the arts for 16 years, lecturing, showing new media work, and presenting installations on five continents and one subcontinent. He was a 2005 Rockefeller New Media Fellow and a 2007-2008 fellow at Harvard's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and he recently served on a US State Department tech delegation to explore technological tools to strengthen civil society in the face of narco-trafficking violence in the Mexcio-US border region. |
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Christina Xu multitasks at Breadpig, an uncorporation that directs geek resources towards fixing the world. She is also the founding director of the Institute on Higher Awesome Studies, a Knight News Challenge-winning nonprofit that promotes microgranting as a new alternative to traditional funding. |
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 Knight-Mozilla Fellow Dan Schultz (@slifty) is a 2012 Knight-Mozilla Fellow working at The Boston Globe to explore opportunities for newsroom innovation. He graduated from the MIT Media Lab in 2012, where he designed and prototyped an automated bullshit detector for the Internet. Before coming to the lab Dan was trained to think in terms of systems at Carnegie Mellon University, and was awarded a Knight News Challenge grant to write about "Connecting People, Content, and Community" on the PBS Idea Lab. |
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 Knight News Challenge Fellow Dharmishta Rood studies the internet, and is interested in the intersection of technology, culture and human interactions. She is the co-founder of Populous, a Knight funded project that aims to provide collegiate and small town newspapers with the tools they need to survive in a web 2.0 environment. The project exists with three goals: to create an open-source CMS that newspapers can use for free, to create a platform newspaper staff can use to organize around goals, community events and the creation of news, and to integrate networking features that will allow community members to both share and create news. In addition to being a researcher at Harvard Business School, she co-directed t=0, a festival for entrepreneurs, which happened at MIT fall 2011. Dharmishta holds an Ed.M. from Harvard University and a B.A. in Design | Media Arts from UCLA. She is currently learning to do handstands. |
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 Fellow Katrin Verclas is the co-founder and editor of MobileActive.org, a global network of practitioners using mobile phones for social impact. Katrin has written widely on mobile phones in citizen participation and civil society organizations, and mobile phones in health and for development. She is a co-author of Wireless Technology for Social Change, a report on trends in mobile use by NGOs with the UN Foundation and Vodafone Group Foundation, and author of A Mobile Voice: The Use of Mobile Phones in Citizen Media. Katrin's background is in IT management, IT in social change organizations, and in philanthropy. She served as the Executive Director of NTEN: The Nonprofit Technology Network, the national association of IT professionals working in the more than one million nonprofit organizations in the United States. Previously, she served as a program officer at the Proteus Fund, focusing on the use of technology in civic and democratic participation, and in government transparency. She is the editor of "Managing Technology to Meet Your Mission", published by Wiley & Sons, published in April 2009. She is a frequent speaker on ICTs in civil society at national and international conferences. She is 2009 TED Fellow and a fellow at the MIT Media Lab. Katrin serves on the boards of Mobile Voter and Ushahidi. |
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 Visiting Scientist Leo is the Founder/CEO of Sourcemap, a spin-off from the Center for Civic Media dedicated to supply chain transparency. |
 Knight News Challenge Fellow Lisa Williams is the founder and CEO of the largest searchable index of local weblogs, Placeblogger.com. It was a winner of the Knight 21st Century News Challenge Award, a program aimed at funding innovative, open-source tech projects that promote new forms of journalism and access to civic information. In 2008, she participated in TechStars as one of only ten teams out of four hundred to be selected for seed funding and intensive mentoring as part of TechStars' annual start-up incubator program. Before Placeblogger, Williams started H2Otown.info, a nationally recognized citizen journalism community site covering and talking about Watertown, MA, where she lives and works. She has also worked with Boston.com on online community, social networking and blogging. Before that, she was director of the Enterprise Software research group at Yankee Group, a Boston area technology analyst firm. I've got experience in online community building, Drupal, online newspapers/journalism, staffing and managing tech projects. You can email me at lisa ---at-- placeblogger dawtcom. You can also reach me via Twitter, where I am @lisawilliams. |
 Visiting Scientist, MIT Center for Civic Media / Co-founder & Director, Sourcemap Foundation Matthew is a technologist and scholar studying the intersection of community, media, and material culture. His work focuses on understanding the web, the history of logistics and modern environmental ideologies. He is the Co-creator of Sourcemap, a collaborative platform for sharing "where things come from" and Director of Sourcemap Foundation. Matthew is currently at New York University, and is a visiting scientist with the MIT Center for Civic Media. |
 Research Assistant Media Lab Nadav is a researcher and PhD candidate at the MIT Media Lab. He is a member of the Human Dynamics research group and the MIT Center for Civic Media. His research revolves around the intersection between communication networks, social dynamics, and systems that learn. A strong emphasis is given to systems and architectures that empower the edges of the network, giving end users control and ownership over their information and supporting security and privacy features., Prior to the Media Lab, Nadav had been working at a start-up company making communication chips for fiber-to-the-home networking. His R&D roles included system engineering and algorithm development. In addition, he performed consulting for several firms in areas of system engineering, product definition, network security, and locating seed investments. He received his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology cum laude in 2004, specializing in computer networks, machine learning, and signal processing. |
 Nitin Sawhney is Assistant Professor of Media Studies in the Department of Media Studies and Film at the New School. His research, teaching and creative practice engages the critical role of technology, artistic interventions and DIY cultures among communities in contested spaces. He previously taught at the MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology (ACT) and conducted research at MIT on networked collaboration for sustainable product design, ubiquitous and wearable computing, speech/auditory interfaces, and responsive media in urban community spaces. At the MIT Center for Civic Media, Nitin co-founded the Department of Play to design participatory mobile video (the Aago Project) and pedagogical tools to support creative expression and civic agency among marginalized youth. He is currently working on a feature-length documentary film, Flying Paper, about the participatory culture of kite making and flying among children in the Gaza Strip. The film was awarded a seed grant from the National Geographic All Roads Film Project. He recently began a pilot research study in the West Bank and Gaza on the role of participatory media for resilience and civic agency among youth living in conditions of conflict and crisis. |
 Rekha is Director of Projects + Partnerships at Public Radio Exchange (PRX), where she helps public media stations and producers distribute their work beyond broadcast. Rekha is an alum of Comparative Media Studies, where she spent many hours on the streets of Cambridge, MA exploring how people use physical, public spaces to communicate. |
 Visiting Scientist MIT Media Lab Rick Borovoy is a Visiting Scientist at the MIT Media Lab, where he develops tools to facilitate face-to-face interaction. After receiving his Ph.D. from the Media Lab, he co-founded nTAG Interactive, which provides data solutions for networking at conferences, sales meetings, and similar events. Building on that experience, at the Center Rick is developing projects that help neighbors engage face-to-face with their neighborhood. |
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Sara Wylie is part-time faculty for RISD's Digital+Media Department, as well as a co-founder of Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science (PLOTS). She is Public Lab's director of Toxics and Health Research. For the Center for Civic Media, she co-founded and co-directed the ExtrAct Project with Chris Csikszentmihályi. She is currently finishing up her Ph.D. in MIT's History, Anthropology, Science, Technology and Society Program. |
