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Staff and Research Scientists

The staff and research scientists at Comparative Media Studies/Writing play critical everyday roles: promotion, finance, research group leadership, software development, student services, academic administration, and much more. They also help shape CMS/W's culture of participation, serving on Institute working groups, hosting their own special events, and running Independent Activities Program classes around their specialties and passions.

Please use the MIT Directory for current offices and phone numbers.

Emma Anderson

Emma Anderson has a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education. She holds an MA from the University of Buffalo in geology and an BA from Smith College in sociology-anthropology. Her research centers around science, art, making, and play. Prior to her doctoral studies, she worked at Baltimore Woods Nature Center as an environmental educator bringing science lessons into urban kindergarten through 6th-grade classrooms and leading summer campers around the woods.

Katerina Cizek

Katerina Cizek is an influential figure in international media, with over 25 years of experience as a Peabody- and Emmy-winning documentarian, researcher, author, producer, and senior leader working with collective processes and emergent technologies. At MIT, she is a research scientist, and co-founder of the Co-Creation Studio at MIT Open Documentary Lab. She is lead author (with William Uricchio) on the world’s first comprehensive book on co-creating media, Collective Wisdom, published by MIT Press in 2022. At the studio, she designs and leads innovative incubators, workshops, research projects, delegations, and fellowships fusing art, documentary, and journalism with emergent tech and science.

For over a decade, Cizek worked as a documentary director at the National Film Board of Canada, transforming the organization into a world leader of emergent tech storytelling with the projects HIGHRISE and Filmmaker-in-Residence. Founded on both community-based and global partnerships, these two long-form digital projects garnered international awards and critical acclaim. Cizek’s earlier human-rights documentary film projects — on subjects ranging from the handycam media revolution to people smuggling and the Rwandan genocide — instigated criminal investigations, changed United Nations policies, and screened as evidence at an International Criminal Tribunal, as well as on television and at festivals around the world.Currently, Cizek serves on the inaugural Interactive Board of Jurors for the Peabody Awards, amongst others.

Lana Cook

Lana Cook, Ph.D. is Associate Director of the MIT Systems Awareness Lab. Her research explores the use of aesthetics and narrative forms to express emergent sensory, affective and cognitive awareness across individual, relational, and collective levels. Prior, Lana has worked as a strategist at MIT Open Learning, incubating new initiatives in education, including the Refugee Action Hub (ReACT) and Emerging Talent programs. Lana earned a doctorate in English at Northeastern University, with a focus on contemporary American literature, cinema studies and visual culture, where she was a 2014 Humanities Center Fellow investing different iterations and meanings of virality. She received her bachelor’s from University of New Hampshire in English and Philosophy. She is currently writing on a book on the history of the women of the psychedelic sixties. Her work appears in Configurations (John Hopkins University Press), Chacruna, Forced Migration Review (University of Oxford) and other venues.

Christina Couch

Christina Couch is a human interest and finance journalist who’s making the transition into science writing. Her writing credentials include work for Wired Magazine, Discover Magazine, The AV Club, Playboy.com, Time Out Chicago and Entrepreneur Magazine and she’s the author of a financial aid guidebook that came out in 2008, but what she’s most proud of is getting to gesture wildly and say “TODAY I INTERVIEWED THE MOST AMAZING PERSON ON EARTH!” to family and friends at least once a week. Christina has spent the last five years living as a permanent traveler and moving to a different city or country roughly every three months (thank you remote work technology). Aside from travel and space and robots (and traveling space robots), Christina’s interests include awkward dancing, indie videogames and the first three Die Hard movies.

Thesis: Life After Hate: Recovering From Racism

Claudia Darmofal

Claudia joins the Scheller Teacher Education Program as Administrative Assistant where her responsibilities are to support the entire team with day-to-day office operations. Claudia started her professional career as an attorney with a short-stint as a baker. Claudia is also connected to MIT as Heads of House of the Warehouse graduate dorm where she lives with her husband as well as 120 first year MIT graduate students.

Rik Eberhardt

As Studio Manager for the MIT Game Lab, Rik Eberhardt spends his days playing Tetris: with people, boxes, tasklists, equipment, money, and time. When not staring at a spreadsheet trying to fit in another computer purchase, a last minute event budget, or placing undergraduate researchers on a Game Lab project, he's chipping away at spreadsheets on his DS, reproducing pixel-art in Picross and Picross 3D, or managing the ultimate spreadsheet, a game of Sid Meier's Civilization. He is also an instructor for two MIT Game Lab classes on game production and has served as a mentor and director for multiple game development projects including elude, a game about depression produced in the summer of 2010. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from the College of William & Mary, is a Certified Scrum Master, a PMI Agile Certified Practitioner, and is currently working towards a Serious Games MA Certificate from Michigan State University.

Ira Fay

Ira Fay is a Learning Game Designer in The Education Arcade at MIT, an Affiliated Scholar at Hampshire College, and CEO of Fay Games, a studio primarily focused on games for educational impact. Prior to his academic career, Ira was a Senior Game Designer at Electronic Arts (Pogo.com), and before that, he worked at Z-Axis (Activision) on X-Men 3, Maxis on The Sims 2, and Walt Disney Imagineering on ToonTown Online. Ira graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with a bachelor’s degree in computer science and master’s degrees in information systems management and entertainment technology. He is also a published puzzle designer and board game designer, including co-designing expansions for Agricola and Xia: Legends of a Drift System.

Caitlin Feeley

Caitlin Feeley designs and researches educational games and related technologies. Her areas of interest include participatory narratives, museums, STEM topics, and financial education. She was the project manager and co-designer for Vanished, a cross-platform science mystery game/event co-developed with the Smithsonian, which reached more than 6,000 players. Her other game design projects have included Energeo (environmental policy), Rx (pharma development), and Middle Galaxy (career development). She also co-designed the award-winning financial literacy games Farm Blitz and Bite Club for the Doorway to Dreams Fund. She was the 2016 Fellow in Museum Practice at the Smithsonian Center for Learning and Digital Access, and holds a master’s degree in Technology, Innovation and Education from Harvard University.

Mary Cate Gustafson-Quiett

Mary Cate is a curriculum design manager for the STEP Lab and program manager for the Experiential Teaching Opportunities Partnership (xTOP). After earning her B.S. in Secondary Education and Mathematics from DePaul University, Mary Cate assisted, tutored, and taught in a wide range of schools including those in urban, rural, and suburban communities, in public, private, and charter settings. She went on to earn her Masters of Public Affairs from the Goldman School for Public Policy at UC Berkeley. For two years Mary Cate worked as a PLUS Research Fellow for UC Berkeley’s Center for Cities and Schools where she co-designed district policy recommendations with teachers and administrators. Mary Cate welcomes opportunities to flex her co-design, logic, and collaborative leadership skills to help create a more equitable and sustainable education system.

Lydia Guterman

Lydia is the Teacher Development Specialist for RAICA. Before joining the STEP Lab, Lydia was a school librarian in the Boston area. She also coordinated the Media Lab’s Public Library Innovation Exchange (PLIX). Lydia is a firm believer in Seymour Papert’s idea of “hard fun” and loves designing professional development opportunities that are engaging and challenging. Lydia holds a B.A. in American Studies from Wellesley College and an M.Ed. in Library Media Studies from Salem State University.

Brandon Hanks

Brandon is the lead developer on the Connected Learning Initiative. His development efforts focus on educational games and the technology to deliver them. Prior to joining MIT, built and managed development teams for a variety of start ups ranging from Android development to remote sensing. Brandon has bachelor degrees in math and physics, with a minor in chemistry.

Gabriella Horvath

Gabriella Horvath is CMS/W's Senior Financial Assistant. Her background includes front-of-house administration for a live theater and founding an independent cinema in Washington. Gabriella received an M.S. in Arts Administration from Boston University ('06). She has been an admin for MIT Venture Mentoring Service, the HyperStudio digital humanities lab, and the Electronic Literature Organization. She was a festival organizer for the MIT European Short Film Festival for several years, and currently coordinates the MIT in 3:00 video competition which launched in 2023.

Elena Kallestinova

Elena Kallestinova is Director of the Writing and Communication Center at MIT and teaches Writing, Rhetoric, and Professional Communication classes. She came to MIT after working for twelve years at Yale University, where she founded and expanded the Graduate Writing Center and served as Assistant Dean for Writing and Communication in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. She has trained, taught, and mentored diverse student populations for more than twenty years and is currently on the Board of Directors of the Consortium on Graduate Communication. With a Ph.D. in Linguistics and an M.A. in TESOL from the University of Iowa and an M.A./B.A. in Computational Linguistics from Moscow State Linguistic University, Elena has significant experience working with international and multilingual students and scholars. She seeks to promote written and oral communication programming to the MIT academic community.

Andreas Karatsolis

Andreas Karatsolis joined MIT in the Fall of 2013 as the Associate Director of Writing, Rhetoric, and Professional Communication, after spending five years in Qatar with Carnegie Mellon University. His disciplinary training includes a Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Communication with an emphasis on technical/professional communication in science-related fields, which is at the core of his teaching and research efforts. In his new role at MIT and as a member of the Administrative Committee of the IEEE Professional Communication Society, he is primarily interested in designing curricula and tools which can help engineers and scientists develop life-long competencies in communication. In the past seven years he has also been the Lead of co-Principal Investigator in projects related to the design, implementation and assessment of learning technologies, especially in the domains of language learning, health communication and public discourse. As a native of Greece (and a reader of Ancient Greek texts), he also enjoys conversations on Classical Rhetoric and its relationship to contemporary scientific communication.

Irene Lee

Irene A. (Anne) Lee is research scientist at MIT’s Scheller Teacher Education Program / Education Arcade. She is the founder and program director of Project GUTS: Growing Up Thinking Scientifically and Teachers with GUTS. The programs she develops enables participants to create computer models then use them to gain a scientific understanding of the world around them. Lee’s research focuses on students’ and teachers’ understanding of complex adaptive systems and their development of computational thinking skills. She is the Chair of the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) Computational Thinking Task Force and serves as a lead writer of the K-12 Computer Science Frameworks and the CSTA K-12 Computer Science Standards. Lee is past president of the Supercomputing Challenge and the Swarm Development Group, and past director of the Learning Lab at Santa Fe Institute.

Camila Lee

Camila is an instructional designer at the Teaching Systems Lab.

Her past research experiences with the Wellesley College Human-Computer Interaction Lab and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Scheller Teacher Education Program have led her to design studies that seek to understand how to optimize learning with different model mediums such as immersive virtual reality. At the TSL, Camila works on projects that support teacher education through online learning experiences. Outside of the lab, she enjoys working on creative projects with her brother and playing badminton with her family.

Grace Lin

As an assessment scientist, Grace Lin is particularly interested in measurement and playful assessments for and of learning. Her research centers around different areas of cognition and how games can be implemented to not just help people learn, but also measure elusive constructs. She received her PhD in Education from University of California, Irvine, an Ed.M. in Mind, Brain, and Education from Harvard Graduate School of Education, and a B.A. in Psychology from New York University. At UC Irvine, she was trained as a Pedagogical Fellow and conducted teaching assistant and course design PD workshops for both first year graduate students and postdocs across various disciplines. Prior to joining MIT, Grace was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Oregon, working with nonprofit organizations and on an early childhood measures repository.

Sharleen Loh

Sharleen Loh is a Learning Game Designer at The Education Arcade, dedicated to advancing STEM learning and equity through immersive experiences. Her projects include WIT, a collaborative mixed reality simulation game for exploring complex systems, and Gnome Gnolf, an augmented reality puzzle game for learning geometry. Prior to joining MIT, Sharleen directed the design of Trailblazer Heroes, a card game celebrating the stories of AAPI heroes. She holds an M.A. in Educational Games from Teachers College, Columbia University, and a B.A. in Psychology from Harvard College. Sharleen’s favorite games always seem to involve adorable animals - including Hollow Knight, Ori, and Root. When not gaming, she can be found crafting or practicing flips on aerial silks.

John Masla

John joins the STEP lab as an assessment specialist with the RAICA project. He previously taught middle school English Language Arts, and has been involved in extracurricular education in basketball, music, and coding. He holds a B.A. in History from Whitman College and a Master of Education (M.Ed) from the University of Washington. Outside of work, he enjoys cooking, playing guitar, and spending time outdoors.

Mary McCrossan

Mary McCrossan works as Events Coordinator for CMS/W and its Scheller Teacher Education Program. She comes from a background of Digital Media at Harvard Law Schools’ Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society’s Youth and Media team and as Event and Marketing Specialist at a Life Science Company in Cambridge, MA. At STEP, Mary’s work focuses on the development and deployment of social media for the STEP team and helps to coordinate events such as the Science Engineering Program for Teachers each summer and any events partnered with XQ Schools and the STEP team. Her work expands at the lab throughout the school year as STEP continues to co-design authentic learning experiences for teachers and students.

Rachel Moody

Rachel Moody manages STEP, MIT’s undergraduate teacher education program. She comes from a doctoral program at Boston College, where she supervised student teachers all around Boston and taught courses in their teacher licensure sequence. For three years during her studies, she was also an adjunct lecturer in education at Brandeis University. Rachel holds a B.A. in Latin American Studies from Wellesley College and an M.A. in Education from the Stanford Teacher Education Program. Her K-12 teaching experience includes time in public schools and group homes in Costa Rica and Mexico, working in migrant education in California, and teaching Spanish for 5 years in Cambridge, MA. She loves designing engaging and equitable assessments and thinking about how to merge her other passion—woodworking—with her background in teaching. Rachel is very excited to be in a role where she gets to work so closely with pre-service teachers and help people engage deeply with the complexities of teaching.

Kate Moore

Kate Moore is a research scientist who studies how to teach middle and high school students about systems and ethics of artificial intelligence and machine learning. She earned her doctoral degree at Teachers College, Columbia University, where she studied cooperative learning and collaborative problem solving, and worked part-time as a professional development coach for STEM teachers in New York City public schools with the Center for the Professional Education of Teachers (CPET). Before entering the world of research and design, Kate served as a middle school science and special education teacher for 10 years. She has worked in public, independent, and charter schools in New York City NY, Newark NJ, and Pittsburgh PA.

Scot Osterweil

Scot Osterweil is a research scientist and creative consultant to the Education Arcade and Game Lab. He has designed award-winning games in both academic and commercial environments, focusing on what is authentically playful in challenging academic subjects. Designs include the acclaimed Zoombinis series (math and logic), Vanished: The MIT/Smithsonian Curated Game (environmental science), Labyrinth (math), Kids Survey Network (data and statistics), Caduceus (medicine), and iCue (history). He is a founder, President, and Creative Director of Learning Games Network, where he lead the Gates Foundation’s Language Learning Initiative (ESL), and where he designed Quandary, named Game of the Year at the 2013 Games 4 Change festival. He co-authored the book Resonant Games (MIT Press) and served as the play consultant on the Emmy Award winning Amazon TV series Tumbleleaf.

Judy Perry

Judy Perry is Director of STEP/TEA, overseeing design, development, and research across the lab’s projects. Prior to serving as Director, Perry spent 15+ years in STEP as a Research Manager where her research focused on mobile and AR/VR educational games, simulations, and toolkits, and their integration into formal and informal learning settings. Her work included the TaleBlazer augmented reality (AR) software platform, CLEVR (Collaborative Learning Environments in Virtual Reality), pSims (mobile participatory simulations), and CLIx (the Connected Learning Initiative). Prior to joining MIT’s STEP lab, Perry’s work included television and web production, and content development for educational toys. Perry holds a BA in American Studies from Yale University and an EdM in Technology, Innovation, and Education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Dan Roy

Dan Roy is a research scientist at the Education Arcade and the Teaching Systems Lab, designing playful learning experiences for teachers and students alike. He is the lead game designer on the CLEVR project, inviting high school biology students to explore a cell in VR and collaboratively diagnose and treat a genetic disorder. He directs the ELK project, helping teacher candidates practice understanding what students know through roleplay conversations. Dan is also the founder of Skylight Games, a social enterprise inspiring a love of learning through play, starting with languages (Lyriko). Before his current roles, he worked with the Learning Games Network on games to teach language (Xenos) and science (Food Fight, Guts and Bolts), and with the Education Arcade, helping middle-schoolers build curiosity, intuition, and comfort in math through puzzles (Lure of The Labyrinth). He has an S.M. in Comparative Media Studies from MIT and a B.S. in computer science from UMass Amherst.

Thesis: Mastery and the Mobile Future of Massively Multiplayer Games

Jessie Schanzle

Jessie Schanzle works with WRAP, WCC, and ELS. She coordinates the First-Year Essay Evaluation (FEE) and the Graduate Writing Exam (GWE).

Ilana Schoenfeld

Ilana Schoenfeld is a content strategist and producer with a passion for researching, designing, and developing educational experiences at the intersection of digital and physical spaces. She is particularly interested in translating science to story (via various media) to bring abstract concepts to life for diverse audiences. Over the course of her career, she has worked as an education researcher, executive science editor, distance-learning program evaluator, and museum exhibit developer. Schoenfeld holds a master’s in environmental science/social ecology from Yale University and a BA in Latin American History from Brandeis University.

Josh Sheldon

Josh is a leader in computer science education. He strives to help youth learn computing to become empowered citizens and creators of computational artifacts to benefit their communities and society. He is a connector of people, ideas, resources, and organizations. Sheldon’s career has been devoted to human-centered design of learning opportunities and environments, in CS Ed and beyond. Key to that is listening to stakeholders to grasp complex situations and work to co-design paths forward. Sheldon brings expertise in design and implementation of educator professional development/professional learning and facilitation of educator communities of practice. A lifelong learner who quickly grasps new material, he has worked across multiple content domains. Most recently, his focus has been on computer science and computational thinking, but past projects included developing materials and professional learning opportunities in , and complex systems, STEM more generally, and design thinking.

At the Teaching Systems Lab, Josh is project lead for the NSF CSforAll Researcher Practitioner Partnership PACE program, which has built a Networked Improvement Community (NIC) with Massachusetts schools to build human capital to equitably broaden participation in computing.

Sarah Smith

Reporting to the department head, Sarah Smith manages administration and finance for CMS/W.

Danna Solomon

Danna Solomon is the Academic Administrator for CMS/W and the Grad Program in Science Writing. She holds a Master's in Arts, Festival & Cultural Management from Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh, and a BA from Tufts University. Her background is in administrative management in arts, culture, and higher education; in addition to her work at MIT, she works with several local community arts organizations in administration, organizational leadership, and production. Danna plays the flute, and enjoys reading, knitting, interdisciplinary art, food, and puzzles.

Philip Tan

Philip Tan is the creative director for the MIT Game Lab. He teaches CMS.608 Game Design and CMS.611J/6.073J Creating Video Games. For six years, he was the executive director for the US operations of the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, a game research initiative.

He has served as a member of the steering committee of the Singapore chapter of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) and worked closely with Singapore game developers to launch industry-wide initiatives and administer content development grants as an assistant manager in the Media Development Authority (MDA) of Singapore. Before 2005, he produced and designed PC online games at The Education Arcade, a research group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that studied and created educational games. He complements a Master's degree in Comparative Media Studies with work in Boston's School of Museum of Fine Arts, the MIT Media Lab, WMBR 88.1FM and the MIT Assassins' Guild, the latter awarding him the title of "Master Assassin" for his live-action roleplaying game designs. He also founded a DJ crew at MIT.

Thesis: Tensions in Live-Action Roleplaying Game Design: A Case Study with the MIT Assassins’ Guild

Jessica Tatlock

Jessica Tatlock joined CMS headquarters staff in July 2009 after a brief stint with Henry Jenkins' Project New Media Literacies. She had spent the previous year coordinating the Internet Safety Technical Task Force at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Prior to Harvard, Jessica worked for more than a decade in Boston's youth development and education fields, developing programs, tools and resources for practitioners working in a wide range of settings. She has an M.Ed in Cultural Diversity and Curriculum Reform from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and lives in Brookline with her two children.

Jessica Taylor

Jessica Taylor serves CMS/W as a Financial Administrator, focusing on process improvement, proposal submission, accurate and efficient financial management, compliance with regulatory requirements, and alignment with MIT and CMS/W’s research goals.

Angie Tung

Angie joined the lab with years of product management in public broadcasting followed by a brief stint in the corporate web production world. Early exposure to Tetris and Dr. Mario taught her the joys of putting things in proper order and that the completion of neat packages can efficiently shorten a task list. Games like D&D taught her to look outside those proverbial neat boxes for creative solutions to tricky puzzles, including complex projects with multi-layered dependencies. On a daily basis she helps to take care of tasks related to: development process, contracts, budget, schedules, scope, vendor relationships and other planning duties. Angie holds a BA in Music from Florida State University and a MA in Media Arts from Emerson College.

Sara Verrilli

Sara Verrilli has spent her professional career in the videogame industry, starting with the day she walked out of MIT's Course V graduate studies and into a position as QA Lead at Looking Glass Technologies for System Shock. However, her game organizing endeavors started much earlier; she helped found a role-playing club at her high school by disguising it as a bridge group.

Since then, she's been a game designer, a product manager, a producer, and a QA manager, in no particular order. A veteran of both Looking Glass Technologies and Irrational Games, she's worked on eight major published games, and several more that never made it out the door. As Development Director of the MIT Game Lab, she looks forward to corralling, encouraging, and exploring the creative chaos that goes into making great games, and figuring out just the right amount of order to inject into the process. And, while she still doesn't understand bridge, she does enjoy whist.

Aditi Wagh

Aditi Wagh is a Research Scientist in the Scheller Teacher Education Program at MIT. Her work sits at the intersection of learning sciences, science education and computing. Her research examines how computational modeling - use of computation to express and refine ideas that explain the causal underpinnings of a phenomenon, typically through discourse with data and peers - can be made a sustained practice in science classrooms. To this end, her research spans three levels: 1. Design of novel modeling software and curricula that advance students' scientific work; 2. Examining how teachers can facilitate computational modeling practices in classrooms; and, 3. Building capacity at the district level for sustainable change. Dr Wagh is the recipient of several NSF grants in science and computing education. She has a PhD in Learning Sciences from Northwestern University.

Daniel Wendel

After taking several Scheller Teacher Education Program classes as an MIT undergraduate, Wendel officially joined STEP as a Master of Engineering student under Professor Klopfer’s supervision in 2005, taking on the task of rewriting StarLogo TNG’s terrain system and much of its 3D rendering system. After graduation and a brief stint as a systems engineer in the defense industry, Wendel returned to STEP as a staff member to help lead the then-newly-formed Imagination Toolbox project, which aims to increase student interest and ability in STEM subjects through the use of computer tools like StarLogo TNG. Wendel continues to work as a software developer, curriculum designer, and research manager for several projects in STEP and The Education Arcade, and also takes his role as a student supervisor and mentor seriously. He’s worked closely with more than 40 Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) and MEng students who’ve contributed in countless ways to STEP and The Education Arcade.

Sarah Wharton

Sarah joins the Scheller Teacher Education Program lab as a curriculum designer. Prior to joining the lab, Sarah spent three years teaching computer science to middle school students in Cambridge, where she crafted her own computer science curriculum. She is deeply invested in making computational thinking accessible, equitable, and exciting to students. Before teaching, Sarah was a STEP student, where she studied math education with the goal of getting all students to identify themselves as “math people.” She holds a B.S. in Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Literature from MIT.

Andrew Whitacre

Andrew directs the communications efforts for CMS/W and Responsible AI for Social Empowerment and Education. A native of Washington, D.C., he holds a degree in communication from Wake Forest University, with a minor in humanities, as well as an M.F.A. in creative writing from Emerson College.

This work includes drawing up and executing strategic communications plans, with projects including website design, social media management and training, press outreach, product launches, fundraising campaign support, and event promotions.