I am currently an Assistant Professor at Purdue University and an external research collaborator for Facebook. I lead the Community-Computer Interaction Lab (C-CIL) with my graduate and undergraduate students.
In Spring 2017 I completed a postdoc (Research Associate) at Open Lab within Newcastle University. I earned my PhD in Human Computer Interaction Design in 2016 from the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University, with a minor in Inquiry Methodology. I also hold a B.S. in Computer Science from Ball State University and a M.S. in Human Computer Interaction Design from Indiana University.
My research interests center on the impact that digital technologies have on how communities are formed and maintained. I am particularly interested in how certain kinds of relationships between individuals within a community are encouraged while others are discouraged, and how various technologies are used to implicitly enforce these distinctions. How interpersonal relationships are sanctioned (in both senses of the word) plays a vital role in the inclusivity, welcomeness, and diversity of a community.
In recent projects, I have studied maker, hacker, and DIY communities through both physical and digital ethnographies, the participatory design of hackathon-like events, and large-scale listserv communication analyses. In this work, I have focused on explicating the ways in which individuals develop identities as makers/hackers/expert-amateurs, as well as how they participate in their community. In my post-doctoral work on digital civics, I extended the methodological lenses I have developed to threads related to social care, civic engagement, and health informatics, specifically focusing on how individuals transition to their lives as new parents.
My research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the Intel ISTC Social Computing program. I am an alum of the Cultural Research In Technology (CRIT) Group at Indiana University.