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Visiting Research Scholars

2023-24 Visiting Research Scholars

  • Visiting Research Scholar

 

Imaculada Gutiérrez García-Pardo, CITS Visiting Research Scholar, is Adjunct Professor in the Department of Statistics and Data Science at the Complutense University of Madrid. 

  • Visiting Research Scholar

Muhammad Shaban, CITS Visiting Research Scholar from March to December 2023, is a Professor of English and Chair at Riphah International University, Pakistan. His interdisciplinary research interests seek solutions to current societal problems through the lens of language. He has published research on computer-mediated communication, social media politics, cyberbullying, translanguaging, and ESL learners' writing challenges. He has taught courses on language, discourse, and media, dissertation writing, and research methods in applied linguistics. His teaching philosophy is to promote social cohesion that emphasizes the dynamic use of multiple languages to enhance and make learning goals more attainable.

Past Visiting Research Scholars

  • Visiting Research Scholar

Rasha A. Abdulla was a CITS Visiting Research Scholar. Dr. Abdulla is a Professor and Past Chair of Journalism and Mass Communication at the American University in Cairo. Her research interests include the uses and effects of mass media, new media, particularly the Internet, development communication and education through entertainment, freedom of expression, as well as music and music videos as communication media. She is the author of "The Internet in Egypt and the Arab World,""The Internet in the Arab World: Egypt and Beyond," "Policing the Internet in the Arab World," and numerous other research articles, reports, and book chapters.

Rasha's faculty lecture "The role of social media in the aftermath of Egypt's revolution" happened on December 5, 2012. 

Saraswathi (Saras) Bellur
  • Visiting Research Scholar

Saraswathi (Saras) Bellur was a CITS Visiting Scholar in Fall 2019. An Associate Professor in the Department of Communication, University of Connecticut. Dr. Bellur’s research focuses on understanding the psychological and physiological effects of interactive media on communication processes and outcomes. Dr. Bellur’s research has also focused on explication and measurement issues related to interactivity, cognitive heuristics, and user engagement.

  • Visiting Research Scholar

Nadine Bol is an Assitant Professor at Tilburg Univeristy. She is part of the university’s School of Humanities and Digital Sciences and the Department of Communication and Cognition. Her research focuses on the social and ethical implications of digital technologies, particularly in the field of health communication. More specifically, she researches questions related to why, how, and under which conditions people use digital technologies for health-related purposes, as well as the impact of technology on cognitive, social, and behavioral outcomes.

Simone Brown
  • Visiting Research Scholar

Simone Browne is a former CITS Visiting Research Scholar in 2015. Dr. Brown is Associate Professor in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She teaches and researches surveillance studies, popular culture, digital media and black diaspora studies.

Simone's faculty lecture "DARK MATTERS: Surveillance of Blackness" happened on November 19, 2015. 

  • Visiting Research Scholar

Dr. Belén Casas-Mas is  a European Doctor and Master in Social Communication from the University Complutense of Madrid (UCM, Spain), where she obtained the Extraordinary Doctorate Award in 2017. She works as an Assistant Professor in the area of Sociology at the Faculty of Information Sciences of the UCM, where she has been teaching since 2013. She is a member of the Complutense Innova Group - Docentia with which she is currently participating in the project "University and society: Communication and integration in companies and public institutions and non-profit organizations” since 2016. She has evaluated papers for various scientific journals such as Labor Studies Journal, Spanish Journal of Sociological Research (REIS), Documentation of Information Sciences, Politics and Society. At present, she is researching in the area of communication in social networks specializing in the polarization of political and social debates and the analysis of hate speech, as a member of the UCM Research Group "Data Science and Soft Computing for Social Analytics and Decision Aid" in the R+D project  "The Structure of Network Communication and Inclusive Public Opinion. A Study with Big Data Techniques and Analysis of Social Networks". (2020-2014).

Link to recorded talk: https://youtu.be/rqlmpVH0fCg

  • Visiting Research Scholar

Homero Gil de Zúñiga was a Visiting Research Scholar in 2010. He holds the Medienwandel Professorship at University of Vienna, where he directs the Media Innovation Lab (MiLab). He is also a Research Fellow at the Universidad Diego Portales, and the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. His research addresses the influence of new technologies and digital media over people's daily lives, as well as the effect of such use on the overall democratic process.

Homero's faculty lecture, "Democracy and the Effects of Citizen and Traditional Journalism," happened on November 4, 2010.

  • Visiting Research Scholar

David C. DeAndrea (PhD, Michigan State University, 2011) is an associate professor and the director of graduate studies in the School of Communication at the Ohio State University. His research examines how features of communication technology affect processes of impression management. His work on person perception and behavioral attribution occurs in an array of online contexts; the central aim of this work is to better understand how people infer the motives of online message sources to determine the degree of social influence sources can exert. 

Mikkel Flyverbom
  • Research Fellow

Mikkel Flyverbom is Professor of Communication and Digital Transformations at the Department of Management, Society and Communication, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. He is academic director of the research platform Transformations: Technology, Data and Knowledge in the Digital Age and founding director the BSc in Business Administration and Digital Management program. With a background in communication, his work explores the workings and consequences of digital transformations, with a particular interest in questions about transparency and visibilities, datafication and knowledge production, and anticipation and governance.

  • Visiting Research Scholar

Susan C. Herring is a Visiting Research Scholar in the Center for Information Technology and Society during the 2022-2023 academic year. At Indiana University Bloomington, she is Professor of Information Science and Linguistics and Director of the Center for Computer-Mediated Communication, which she founded. One of the first scholars to conduct linguistic analysis of textual computer-mediated communication, in recent years she has focused on multimodal CMC. She is interested in understanding and describing the nature of technologically mediated communication, its effects on self-expression, interpersonal interaction, and its social impacts. She has also studied telepresence robot-mediated interaction and is fascinated by holographic telepresence, the integration of AI into human-human communication, and the implications of "deep fake" technology. She has published nearly 200 works, including 11 edited collections, mostly on CMC. A past editor of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, she currently edits the online journal Language@Internet. 

Link to recorded talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoYTCE_8Eso

Younbo Jung
  • Visiting Research Scholar

Younbo Jung is Associate Professor of the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

His research interests include socio-psychological effects of interactive media such as video games, virtual reality systems, human-machine interaction, and their applications in education and medical aids.

Ulrike Klinger
  • Visiting Research Scholar

Ulrike Klinger was a CITS Visiting Research Scholar from March through May of 2017 and again in 2021. Dr. Klinger's research interests include the societal and cultural implications of communication and IT, strategic communication and politicians’ use of digital media, digital media and democratic processes, as well as comparative analysis of media structures and media regulation. Her current project is "Transforming the digital public sphere: IT engineers as communicators."

Ulrike's faculty lecture "Who's Afraid of Facebook? Perceptions about Social Media in Europe" happened on April 26, 2017. 

  • Visiting Research Scholar

Karolina Koc-Michalska was a CITS Visiting Research Scholar from June through September 2017. She is a Professor at Audencia Business School. Her research interest focuses on political parties’ strategic online communication during electoral time, especially the usage of social media, as well as new media effects on societies. She extends this work through comparative research within the European countries and US. During her stay at CITS, she explored the motivations leading to political participation and the role of fake news in societies.

Carleen Maitland
  • Visiting Research Scholar

Carleen Maitland is a former CITS Visiting Research Scholar. Dr. Maitland is Professor of Information Sciences and Technology and co-director of the Institute for Information Policy at Penn State University. Her research and teaching examine the institutional context of humanitarian organizations and its implications for access to and use of information and communication technologies.

Joshua Meyer-Gutbrod
  • Visiting Research Scholar

Joshua Meyer-Gutbrod was a National Science Foundation Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, pursuing research in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research focuses on how the growth of national partisan polarization interacts with state politics, intergovernmental relations, and the decentralization of policy implementation within American federalism. 

  • Visiting Research Scholar

Jennifer Pierre is a User Experience Researcher at Google, working at the intersection of fan funding, live-streaming, and gaming, as part of the YouTube emerging experiences team. Her general interests are in human-computer interaction and information science in social, digital, and interactive media; and how people—particularly underrepresented and minoritized groups—use various forms of media and data to form and maintain communities. Dr. Pierre earned her masters and Ph.D. in Information Studies. 

  • PostDoc Research Fellow

Doc Searls' professional history includes Hodskins Simone and Searls — the advertising and public relations agency which he co-founded in North Carolina in 1978, and which went West to become one of Silicon Valley's leading advertising and public relations agencies.

Now a noted consultant to a number of international technology firms, he is a frequent professional speaker on technology industry trends. 

Clara ter Hoeven
  • Visiting Research Scholar

Clara ter Hoeven was a CITS Visiting Scholar from November 2016 through June 2017. Dr. Clara ter Hoeven is an associate professor at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research ASCoR, University of Amsterdam. Her research focuses on communication technology use, flexible work designs, work-life policies, and employee well-being.

Clara's faculty lecture, "Robot Technology Use: Threat or Treasure? The Impact of Robotization on Employee Well-Being" happened on December 1, 2016. 

Stephanie Tong
  • Visiting Research Scholar

Stephanie Tong is an Associate Professor of Communication at Wayne State University in Detroit, MI. In her work, she examines how popular social media systems impact human communication across the relational lifecycle—from initiation, maintenance, to dissolution and termination. Dr. Tong is currently exploring how artificial intelligence algorithms embedded in online and mobile dating apps influence the decisions people make about whom to date. During her stay at CITS, she will be investigating how AI influences people’s choices regarding their personal health.

Her work is supported by the National Science Foundation and has appeared in a variety of top outlets including, New Media & Society, Psychology & Health, Personal Relationships, Communication Research, and Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. When she’s not in the lab or the classroom, you’ll find her in the great outdoors running, hiking, or rock climbing with her husband and their two rescue dogs— “chugs” (Chihuahua-Pugs) named JB and Panzer. 

  • Visiting Research Scholar

Derek W. Vaillant is an historian whose research embraces the social and cultural history of American music, sound studies, and the history of broadcasting in the U.S. and in France. He is the author of Sounds of Reform: Progressivism and Music in Chicago, 1873-1935 (Chapel Hill, 2003) and Across the Waves: How the United States and France Shaped the International Age of Radio (Urbana, 2017). His latest book looks at how U.S.–French interaction developed international broadcasting as a transatlantic technological, social, and cultural medium in the twentieth century. He has previously worked in public/educational broadcasting, including research and production for a Peabody award-winning series NPR and several PBS projects with Bill Moyers.

Stephan Winter
  • Visiting Research Scholar

Stephan Winter is a former CITS Visiting Research Scholar. He is a Professor of Media Psychology at RPTU Kaiserslautern-Landau in Germany. Dr. Winter's research focuses primarily on credibility and information selection as well as on processes of attitude formation and expression in new media environments. Furthermore, he is interested in personalization and message targeting in social media. To learn more about Stephan's current and past research see his Homepage at the University of Kaiserslautern-Landau.