Affiliated Faculty

  • Faculty Research Affiliate

Sharon Tettegah is a Professor in Black Studies, and the Director for the Center for Black Studies Research at UC Santa Barbara. Her research focuses on using data science to examine empathy, and game technology and virtual environments within teaching and learning milieus. Her most recent research examines affective, behavioral, and cognitive facets of empathy and empathic dispositions using multiple technologies (e.g., functional magnetic resonance imaging, simulations, games). Her interest and research in data science, empathic design, emotions and technology is the result of passion and commitment to the improvement of equity in leadership, teaching and learning.

  • CITS Faculty Affiliate

Simon Todd is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at U C Santa Barbara. His research focuses on the power of passive listening for developing and accessing knowledge about language varieties and the people that speak them. He has examined how people who don't speak a language gain impressive implicit knowledge of its regularities by being exposed to it often, and  how social stereotypes based on the way that someone sounds can influence what listeners remember them saying. His work uses a combination of computational modeling, behavioral experiments, and statistical analysis of large bodies of language data.

  • Faculty Research Affiliate

Cristina Venegas is an Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies. Dr. Venegas focuses her research on international media with an emphasis on Latin America, Spanish-language film and television in the U.S., and digital technologies. She has written about film and political culture, revolutionary imagination in the Americas, telenovelas, contemporary Latin American cinema, co-productions and a monograph dealing with cyberculture in Cuba.

Joe Walther
  • Past Director
  • Faculty Research Affiliate

Joseph B. Walther is the Mark and Susan Bertelsen Presidential Chair in Technology and Society, and a Distinguished Professor of Communication at UCSB. A behavioral scientist and theorist, his work concentrates on how people present themselves to one another via the Internet and how they use the Internet to shape how they want to be known to each other; how they get to know others and decide who to like or trust, and how they develop relationships online that affect their work or social roles. Applications of his work in personal relationships, online groups, education settings, and inter-ethnic conflict have had a significant influence across a number of fields.

William Wang
  • Faculty Research Affiliate
William Wang is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at UC Santa Barbara. His interests include computational social science and the study of the dissemination of misinformation, machine learning approaches to data science, including statistical relational learning, information extraction. He has garnered an IBM Faculty Award, and the Richard King Mellon Presidential Fellowship in 2011. He has also worked for Yahoo! Labs, Microsoft Research Redmond, and University of Southern California. In addition to research, William enjoys writing scientific articles that impact the broader online community: His microblog has more than 2,000,000 views each month.
  • Faculty Research Affiliate

William Warner is a Professor in the English Department. Dr. Warner’s central interests include Eighteenth century British and American literature and cultural studies, the novel, literary and cultural theory, media studies, and law and literature (free speech and censorship). He is currently at work on the Transcriptions Project, and a project on enlightenment and contemporary IT culture.

  • Faculty Research Affiliate

René Weber is Professor in the Department of Communication and lead researcher at UCSB’s Media Neuroscience Lab. His research focuses on cognitive responses to mass communication and new technology media messages, including video games. He develops and applies both traditional social scientific and neuroscientific methodology (fMRI) to test media related theories. His research has been published in major communication and neuroscience journals and in three authored books. He is an Executive Council member of UCSB’s SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind, and one of five neuromarketing experts accredited by the Advertising Research Foundation. 

  • Faculty Research Affiliate

John Woolley is a Professor of Political Science. Dr. Woolley's current research focuses on change over time in the presidency and presidential use of unilateral action. Together with Gerhard Peters, Woolley has developed an extensive web-based resource on the American presidency (www.presidency.ucsb.edu), which is widely used by scholars and others interested in the presidency and American political history.

  • Faculty Research Affiliate

Bob York serves as Distinguished Professor of the Technology Management Department, and Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering at UC Santa Barbara. Prof. York’s research focuses on high-speed and wireless electronic devices and antennas. He has over 240 technical publications and holds 17 US Patents. He received Young Investigator Awards from the Army Research Office (1993) and Office of Naval Research (1996) for his work in high-power amplifiers and antenna arrays, and received the Outstanding Young Engineer award in 2004 from the MTT Society of the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineering (IEEE). He was elected Fellow of the IEEE in 2009, and also has been voted Outstanding Faculty member several times by the graduating senior class at UCSB. 

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