People

Faculty Research Affiliates

Linda Adler-Kassner
  • Faculty Research Affiliate

Linda Adler-Kassner is the Faculty Director of CITRAL, Professor of Writing Studies, and Associate Vice Chancelor of Teaching and Learning. Always working at the intersection of research and practice, her interests include how technological affordances shape ideas about good learning and good learners; the datafication of education, learning, and learning processes; and how technological affordances can support learning at scale, i.e., in large lecture-based courses. Dr. Adler-Kassner is an author or co-editor of nine books and dozens of articles and book chapters; she also was awarded UCSB’s Distinguished Teaching Award in 2015. 

 

  • Faculty Research Affiliate

Divyakant Agrawal is a Professor of Computer Science whose research expertise is in the areas of database systems, distributed computing, data warehousing, and large-scale information systems. Dr. Agrawal's involvement with CITS reflects his research philosophy, which is to work on data management problems that have both practical as well as theoretical significance. He has published approximately 300 research manuscripts in prestigious forums (journals, conferences, symposia, and workshops) on a wide range of topics related to data management and distributed systems.

  • Steering Committee Member
  • Faculty Research Affiliate

Elizabeth M. Belding is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Associate Dean in the College of Engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Elizabeth’s research focuses on mobile and wireless networking, including network performance analysis, and information and communication technologies for development (ICTD). Her work has focused on improving Internet accessibility in developing communities worldwide. She is the founder and director of the Mobility Management and Networking (MOMENT) Laboratory. Elizabeth is the author of over 100 technical papers and has served on over 60 conference technical program committees. She is an ACM Distinguished Scientist and an IEEE Fellow. She received the UCSB Outstanding Graduate Mentor Award in 2012 and the NCWIT Harrold and Notkin Research and Graduate Mentoring Award in 2015 for her mentorship of graduate students. She was the Associate Director of CITS from 2012-2015.

  • Past Director
  • Steering Committee Member
  • Faculty Research Affiliate

Bruce Bimber is a Professor in the departments of Political Science and (by affiliation) Communication. Dr. Bimber’s research examines the relationship between digital media and patterns in human behavior, especially in the domains of political organization and collective action. He is a founder and Director Emeritus (from 1999-2006) of the Center for Information Technology and Society. He is a fellow of the International Communication Association. 

  • Faculty Research Affiliate

John Bowers holds the Fred Kavli Chair in Nanotechnology. He is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. In addition, her directs the Institute for Energy Efficiency and the Center for Energy Efficient Materials. His research interests are primarily concerned with silicon photonics, optoelectronic devices, optical switching and transparent optical networks.

Dolores Inés Casillas
  • Faculty Research Affiliate

Dolores Inés Casillas is a Professor in the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies, a Faculty Affiliate in both of Film & Media Studies and Applied Linguistics at UCSB.

Her research focuses on immigrant engagement with U.S. Spanish-language media.    Co-author of several award-winning books including a recent project that examines how Spanish-dominant communities rely and revive specific media industries in the United States from DVD rentals via Red Box and smartphone applications such as What’s App, to language learning media, both online and audio-lingual, like Open English and Inglés Sin Barreras. Her 2020 NPR interview "Latino Empowerment through Public Broadcasting," is available at https://youtu.be/plgw01pPzTc

  • Faculty Research Affiliate

Alenda Y. Chang is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies. With a multidisciplinary background in biology, literature, and film, she specializes in merging environmental criticism with the analysis of contemporary media. While at Berkeley, Chang served on the Executive Committee of the Berkeley Center for New Media and worked as the executive producer for AirQuest, a civic-action game designed to motivate young people to learn more about air-quality issues in their local communities as well as the triggers and risk factors for asthma. She also maintains an informal resource blog for game studies and environmental humanities scholars.

Dr. Chang was featured in WalletHub's recent piece about the best and worst cities for gamers.

  • Faculty Research Affiliate

Jeremy Douglass is an Associate Professor of English at University of California, Santa Barbara. Dr. Douglass conducts research on interactive narrative, electronic poetry, and games, with a particular focus on applying the methods of software studies, critical code studies, and information visualization to the analysis of digital texts. Professor Douglass been supported by agencies including the NEH Office of Digital Humanities, MacArthur Foundation, Mellon Foundation, ACLS, Calit2, HASTAC, and NERSC.

Norah Dunbar
  • Faculty Research Affiliate
Norah Dunbar is a Professor of Communication. Her research interests include deceptive communication, credibility assessment, deception detection, power and dominance In interpersonal interaction, computer-mediated communication, nonverbal communication, and observational and experimental research methods. She has developed several online games to help individuals detect deception. 
  • Faculty Research Affiliate
  • Steering Committee Member

 Amr El Abbadi is a Professor of Computer Science and the former chair of the department. Dr. Abbadi’s research interests are the ever increasing amount of data being generated and analyzed. He has been involved in designing systems and database support for collaborative environments with a special interest in social media applications and issues related to privacy preservation. Professor Abbadi is a Fellow of ACM, IEEE, and AAAS, and served as a board member of the VLDB Endowment from 2002 - 2008 as well as the Executive Committee of the Technical Committee of Data Engineering (TCDE). 

  • Past Director
  • Steering Committee Member
  • Faculty Research Affiliate

Andrew Flanagin is a Professor in the Department of Communication and former director (2009-2012) of the Center for Information Technology and Society. Dr. Flanagin’s research focuses on how communication and information technologies structure and extend human interaction, with particular emphases on processes of organizing and information sharing and evaluation.

  • Faculty Research Affiliate (Emeritus)

James Frew is an Emeritus faculty member in the Donald Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, formerly the principal investigator at the University’s Institute for Computational Earth System Science (ICESS), his research interests lie in the emerging field of environmental informatics, a synthesis of computer, information, and Earth sciences. 

Jennifer Gibbs
  • Faculty Research Affiliate

Jennifer Gibbs (Ph.D, Annenberg School of Communication at USC) is a Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research focuses on collaboration in global teams and other distributed work arrangements, as well as the affordances of new technologies such as social media for strategic communication practices. Her current projects include studies of: 1) social media and organizational knowledge sharing, 2) global virtual team collaboration, 3) social support and normative control in online communities, and 4) distraction and the role of new technologies. 

Amy Gonzales
  • Faculty Research Affiliate

Amy Gonzales is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her work examines the consequences of disrupted access to communication technology. She is especially interested in these phenomena for people from disadvantaged communities (e.g., racial/ethnic minorities, low-income populations, LGBTQ individuals, etc.). Her work aims to advance theoretical understanding and real-world solutions that may help mitigate the long-term consequences of new digital infrastructures that may otherwise exacerbate social inequalities. 

  • Faculty Research Affiliate

Barbara Herr Harthorn is a Professor of  Anthropology, with affiliate positions in the departments of Feminist Studies and Sociology. Her research broadly examines culture and health, health inequality, and technological risk and perception. Her work in the Center for Nanotechnology in Society at UCSB examines nanotechnological risk perception among both experts and diverse US and comparative UK publics.

  • Steering Committee Member
  • Faculty Research Affiliate

Jennifer Holt is an Associate Professor in the Film and Media Studies Department who specializes in the study of media industries and regulatory policy. She is the author of Empires of Entertainment (2010), and the co-editor of Media Industries (2009); Connected Viewing (2014); and Distribution Revolution (2014). Her current research explores media policy as it relates to global cloud infrastructure and digital distribution. She is also a founding editorial collective member of the Media Industries journal, and a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.

  • Faculty Research Affiliate

Krzysztof Janowicz is a Professor for Geographic Information Science in the Geography Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Professor Janowicz’s research focuses on the geo-spatial semantics and data infrastructures in general. He is the program chair of the Cognitive Science Program and one of two Editors-in-Chief of the Semantic Web journal. He also runs the STKO Lab which investigates the role of space and time for knowledge organization. 

  • Faculty Research Affiliate

Lisa Jevbratt is a Professor in the Art Department and the Media Art Technology program. Her work, ranging from Internet visualization software to biofeedback and interspecies collaboration, is concerned with collectives and systems, the languages and conditions that generate them, and the exchanges within them.

  • Faculty Research Affiliate

Dan Lane is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication. Working at the intersection of political communication, intergroup communication, and communication technology, his research examines how political expression on social media can stimulate political engagement, improve intergroup relations, and reduce political inequality. Dr. Lane was the founder of Good Eye Video, a digital storytelling company working with non-profits and social causes worldwide.

  • Faculty Research Affiliate

George Legrady is a Professor of Interactive Media, with a joint appointment in the Media Arts & Technology program and the Department of Art. He is director of the Experimental Visualization Lab and Chair of the Media Arts & Technology doctoral program. His research addresses data collection, data processing methodologies and data visualization presented simultaneously in interactive installations and the Internet. Professor Legrady was one of 5 artists commissioned to create an artwork about deep space in collaboration with the Caltech managed NASA Spitzer Space Center. He was awarded a National Science Foundation Intelligence & Information System grant in 2011, and a National Science Foundation Arctic Social Science Grant, and the Creative Capital Foundation grant amongst many others for his creative work. 

  • 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.

  • Faculty Research Affiliate

Amy Propen is an Associate Professor of Digital and Multimodal Writing in the Writing Program. Her research interests include visual and material rhetorics, environmental and sustainability rhetorics, digital and posthuman rhetorics, animal studies, human geography, critical cartographies, and critical GIS. She is particularly interested in the connections between multimodal technologies, the posthuman, and environmental and marine species conservation.

  • Steering Committee Member
  • Faculty Research Affiliate

Rita Raley is a Professor in the Department of English, where she serves as co-director of the Literature and Culture of Information specialization. She is the author of Tactical Media and has more recently published articles on digital poetics, dataveillance, and interventionist art practices. She co-edited a journal issue on "securing with algorithms" and writing about algorithmic translations.

  • Faculty Research Affiliate
Laila Shereen Sakr is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies. With a body of work specializing in computational art, live cinema, data visualization, and media activism, her scholarship uses media analytics, specifically in Arabic, and live cinema to map how participation among networked publics have influenced the formation of a virtual body politic. This research led her to design the R-Shief media system for real-time archiving and analyzing social media content for over five years and with more than twenty five billion posts, and the cyborg representation of VJ Um Amel.
  • Faculty Research Affiliate

Dr. Muniba Saleem is an associate professor in the Department of Communication. Dr. Saleem studies how media affects interpersonal and intergroup relations between racial, ethnic, and religious groups. Current work examines the social psychological antecedents of hate speech on social media sites as well as the consequences of being exposed to such speech for minoritized groups. Other work examines how and why minoritized members use social media for collective action.  

  • Faculty Research Affiliate

Greg Siegel is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara. He is the author of Forensic Media: Reconstructing Accidents in Accelerated Modernity (Duke University Press). His research interests include Media History, Cultural Theory, Science and Technology Studies, Media Theory, Critical Theory, and Sound Studies. 

  • Faculty Research Affiliate
Ambuj K. Singh is a Professor of Computer Science at UC Santa Barbara, with appointments in the Biomolecular Science and Engineering, and the Technology Management Department. His research interests are in the areas of network science, machine learning, social networks, and bioinformatics. His multidisciplinary projects include UCSB’s Information Network Academic Research Center, the Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) on Network Science of Teams (https://muriteams.cs.ucsb.edu/) (both funded by the Army), and the Interdisciplinary Graduate Education Research and Training (IGERT) program on Network Science (NSF). 
  • Faculty Research Affiliate

Eric R.A.N. Smith is a Professor of Political Science. Dr. Smith's research focuses on public opinion, elections, and environmental politics. In the area of environmental politics, he has been examining public opinion toward offshore oil development and nuclear power.

Melissa Smith
  • Faculty Research Affiliate

Melissa Smith is a family medicine physician who has worked in poor communities in the US and Central America providing medical care and developing training programs for community health workers and midwives. Dr. Smith is the Director of Health Equity Initiatives at UC Santa Barbara, and Deputy Director of Education and Training for the UC Global Health Institute's Women's Health Gender and Empowerment Center of Expertise.

  • Past Director
  • Faculty Research Affiliate
  • Steering Committee Member

Cynthia Stohl is Professor in the Department of Communication, a Fellow and Past President of the International Communication Association, and a Distinguished Scholar of the National Communication Association. A leading expert in globalization, networks, and organizational  processes, her most recent work addresses global organizing, collective action, and corporate social responsibility in the digital media environment. In  2012 she received the Outstanding Book award for Collective Action in Organizations: Interaction and Engagement in an Era of Technological Change (co-authored with UCSB Professors Flanagin and Bimber). 

  • Faculty Research Affiliate
Michael Stohl is a Professor in the Department of Communication and an affiliate faculty member in the departments of Global and International Studies and Political Science. His research focuses on organizational and political communication with special reference to terrorism, human rights and global relations. Dr. Stohl has been the recipient of three Fulbright Fellowships, to teach in Denmark, Japan and Korea, and New Zealand in 1983. He was awarded Visiting Research Grants for collaborative research on terrorism at the University of Leiden, The Netherlands, by the Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappeliijk Onderzoek in 1989. 
  • 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.