Biography

Employing both positivistic and naturalistic methods, my research projects currently include network analysis of celebrity news sharing, roommate conflict resolution through SMS and social media, and humanistic inquiry into motivations of film and television producers.I have taught undergraduate courses at UC San Diego, Korea University in Seoul, and Kyoto University of Japan as well as graduate courses in Educational Technology at UCLA’s GSE&IS.  Prior to my full-time appointment in Communication Studies, I worked in the art world, in the financial services industry and was Associate Director of the UCLA Center for Digital Innovation (CDI), a campus-wide digital research and development entity.  During my tenure at CDI, we cultivated industry partnerships with tech companies including Sony and Hitachi to develop new technologies in speech recognition, physics, and economics, as well as scalable online pedagogical tools.  After bidding for and procuring funding, we designed, developed, and produced multiple large-scale online high school AP courses (in subjects ranging from Environmental Science and Physics to Spanish) that are still in use today throughout the state of California.  As a part of the design and management team of several multimillion dollar projects, I was responsible for overseeing the creation of curricular materials, content, film and video footage, interactive simulations, databases, social networking tools, online communities, etc.

While I maintain an active research program, my primary focus over the last ten years in the CS department has been devoted to mentoring, advising, and providing the richest learning environments possible for our world-class students.