I joined the Illinois Institute of Technology as an Assistant Professor in 2010. You can find out more about my work at IIT on my lab website. Before joining IIT, I was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Arizona State’s School of Public Affairs and a Research Fellow at the University of Michigan School of Information. My PhD is also from the University of Michigan School of Information.

I study social media and collaboration. I’m especially interested in relationships among social media use, civic engagement, and diversity and in understanding how people join and leave collaborations and online communities – for instance, how they decide to join, what their experiences as a newcomer entail, and what motivates them to leave.

I’m a multi-methods researcher, and I teach courses on user research, social media, organizational communication, social network analysis and qualitative methods. You can read more about my work in posts tagged “research” and on the Research page. My lab – the Collaboration and Social Media Lab @ IIT – has more info as well.

When I’m not working on research or teaching, I’m probably cooking, watching Michigan Football (Go Blue!), or learning to play guitar. I work on consulting and social media development and user research projects through Research at Work (RAW Labs) and on social media research and tools as a founding member of the Social Media Research Foundation.