Affiliated Faculty

  • Faculty Research Affiliate
  • Steering Committee Member

Paul Leonardi is the Duca Family Professor of Technology Management, and Chair of the Technology Management Department at UC Santa Barbara. He was the founding director of the Master of Technology Management and director of the Ph.D. program in Organization Studies Program at UCSB. Dr. Leonardi is interested in how implementing new technologies and harnessing the power of informal social networks can help companies take advantage of their knowledge assets to create innovative products and services.

  • Steering Committee Member
  • Faculty Research Affiliate

Alan Liu is a Professor and former Chair of the Department of English. His central interests include digital humanities, information culture, new media, literary theory, cultural studies, and British Romantic literature and art. Liu is co-founder and leader of the international 4Humanities.org advocacy initiative. He is directing the topic-modeling project titled WhatEvery1Says. Other digital initiatives he has led include Transliteracies: Research in the Technological, Social, and Cultural Practices of Online Reading, a University of California multi-campus, collaborative research group. 

  • Faculty Research Affiliate

Karen Lunsford is an Associate Professor of Writing, where she specialize in Writing in the Disciplines. Dr. Lunsford’s individual and collaborative work employs interdisciplinary approaches to understand the writing practices that people engage in within evolving knowledge ecologies, how argument and argumentation are defined in these ecologies, and what roles technologies play in these practices and definitions.

  • Steering Committee Member
  • Faculty Research Affiliate

Richard E. Mayer is a Distinguished Professor of Psychology at UCSB. Dr. Mayer’s research involves the intersection of cognition, instruction, and technology with a special focus on multimedia learning and computer-supported learning. He served as President of the Educational Psychology division of the American Psychological Association and Vice President of the American Educational Research Association for the Learning and Instruction division. He is the winner of the Thorndike Award for career achievement in educational psychology, the Scribner Award for outstanding research in learning and instruction, and the American Psychological Association’s Distinguished Contribution of Applications of Psychology to Education and Training Award. 

  • Faculty Research Affiliate

Patrick McCray is a Professor in the Department of History. Dr. McCray’s research focuses on different technological and scientific communities and their interactions with the public and policy makers – especially newly emerging technologies. McCray was elected to be a Fellow by the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Physical Society. His most recent book, Making Art Work examines the interactions between artists, engineers, and scientists from the 1960s to the present. 

  • Steering Committee Member
  • Faculty Research Affiliate

Miriam Metzger directs our doctoral emphasis program, Information Technology and Society and she is a Professor in the Department of Communication. Dr. Metzger’s work has examined how information technology alters our understandings of trust in the new media environment, with a specific focus on the credibility of information online and on how trust intersects with privacy and disclosure in online social networks. She is an internationally recognized expert on misinformation. 

  • Faculty Research Affiliate

Christopher Newfield is a Professor of American culture. Newfield’s research focuses on the processes of creativity and innovation, with a double focus on cultural and technological factors. He has conducted extensive fieldwork in a range of technology-dependent industries and has wide experience with the university side of copyright, patenting, and technology transfer.

  • Past Director
  • Steering Committee Member
  • Faculty Research Affiliate

Lisa Parks is a Distinguished Professor of Film and Media Studies and Director of the Global Media Technologies and Cultures (GMTaC) Lab, which she founded at MIT and moved to UCSB in 2020. Her research is focused on human and social aspects of media infrastructures; satellite technologies and globalization; and media, militarization, and surveillance. Professor Parks is a former Director of CITS and a 2018 MacArthur Fellow.

  • Faculty Research Affiliate

Constance Penley is a Professor of Film and Media Studies. Dr. Penley's research interests include film history and theory, feminist theory, cultural studies, contemporary art, and science and technology studies. Her work includes NASA/TREK: Popular Science and Sex in America and The Visible Woman: Imaging Technologies, Science and Gender (ed. with Treichler and Cartwright).

  • Faculty Research Affiliate

Linda Petzold is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and the Department of Mechanical Engineering. She directs the Computational Science and Engineering graduate emphasis at UCSB. Her research focuses on modeling, simulation, and analysis of multiscale systems in systems biology and materials.

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