Dharmishta Rood is a Masters student at Harvard's Graduate School of Education, studying social media tools and their applications for informal learning. With this interest in new media, she also works at the Berkman center as a RA for Yochai Benkler, delving into online cooperation. She holds a BA in Design | Media Arts from UCLA.

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.