Visitors and Postdoctoral Associates

CMS/W takes pride in welcoming young and established scholars and helping them advance their own work by pairing them with one of our research groups. Past visitors have played key roles in our speaker series, contributed to masters student theses, and established long-term ties between MIT and other institutions.

How how to join us as a visiting scholar or postdoctoral associate.

Nancy Baym Research Affiliate nbaym@mit.edu		Nancy Baym is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research New England, a couple of blocks to the east of CMS/W's haunts. Her work focuses on interpersonal relationships and new technologies. She is the author of Personal Connections in the Digital Age (Polity 2010), Internet Inquiry (co-authored with Annette Markham) (Sage 2009) and Tune In, Log On: Soaps Fandom and Online Community (Sage 1999). Her current research is about musicians' relationships with audiences and how social media affect them.
Bjarke Calvin Fellow, Open Documentary Lab bjarke@mit.edu		Bjarke Calvin is CEO and Founder of Duckling -- an app that makes it easy and playful to share insight media on your mobile device. With Duckling, MIT students and others document the informal knowledge that takes place outside classrooms and papers. The mission is to make insight media a counterweight to the polarization and echo chambers of social media, by introducing a format and a business model built on contextual and collective human thinking. Before launching Duckling, Bjarke founded Storyplanet, which was the first tool for building interactive documentaries without coding. The common denominator in all of Bjarke's work is a fundamental belief that the next step in human evolution lies in collective knowledge created through storytelling. He started a long career in interactive documentary in 2001 with publishing one of the worlds first interactive documentaries, The Enemy Within. The project was recently canonized by IDFA as one the 100 most influential interactive media pieces of this century. After this he worked as head of digital development at Magnum Photos, before staring a long streak as founder and adviser of media startups.
Zeynep Çetin Erus Visiting Scholar zerus@mit.edu		Zeynep Çetin Erus is a Professor at Marmara University, Faculty of Communications in Istanbul, Turkey. Her Ph.D. thesis is on adaptations from novel to cinema. She had been a visiting scholar at Northwestern University during 2002-2004 and 2011-2012 academic years. Her research focuses on adaptations as well as Turkish Cinema industry and Third Cinema movements in Turkey. Her current work investigates striking increase in box office of domestic films in Turkey in a comparative framework. She has several journal articles and three books. She teaches undergraduate and graduate level courses on film studies at Marmara University.
Katerina Cizek MIT Visiting Artist kcizek@yahoo.com		Director of the National Film Board of Canada’s multi-year HIGHRISE project, Katerina Cizek is an Emmy-winning documentary-maker working across multiple media platforms. Prior to HIGHRISE, she worked as the NFB’s Filmmaker in Residence. Her work has documented the digital revolution and has itself become part of the movement. For more information on the MIT Visiting Artists Program, visit Arts@MIT.
Nicholas-Brie Guarriello Predoctoral Fellow nbguarr@mit.edu		Nicholas-Brie (Nick-Brie) Guarriello is joining MIT CMS/W from the University of Minnesota where they are a 4th year Ph.D. Candidate. Their work focuses on audience and fans, Internet celebrity, and digital economies across social media platforms. Currently, their dissertation, titled “A Heart So True?: Relational Labor and Gig Economies in the Pokémon GO Fandom, specifically focuses on the growth of creative workers within various forms of gig economies on social media platforms. They look at the inter-relations between YouTube and Twitter as well as Tumblr and Patreon to theorize what forms of work and labor are now the norm on specific platforms. Since the Pokémon fandom is understudied, they are trying to also think about the potential access gaps or colonial hauntings where some folks are sponsored by industries and partnered with social media platforms whereas others are continually exploited for their labor. Nick-Brie is also a competitive Pokémon Trading Card Game player and you can usually catch them at your local league or a regionals!
Garron Hillaire Postdoctoral Associate garron@mit.edu		Garron Hillaire completed his B.A in Mathematics (philosophy option) from the University of Washington and his Ed. M. Technology Innovation and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. After working as an Educational Software Architect at CAST.org where he researched Universal Design for Learning (UDL) for four year he enrolled in the Open World Learning research program at the Open University, UK as a Ph.D. candidate in Educational Technology. His thesis focuses on emotional measurement and emotional design in online and blended learning with a focus on sentiment analysis using crowd sourcing methods. Currently he is a postdoctoral associate at the CMS/W department at MIT where he is part of the Teaching Systems Lab as a member of the Equity Teacher Practice team which focuses on teacher education using practice spaces such as the Teacher Moments simulations. Practice spaces allow teachers to practice how to interact with colleagues and students to better understand issues of equity as it relates to topics like computer science education in K-12 settings. The Equity Teacher Practice team works with professional development organizations, teacher education programs in higher education, and school districts to support teacher professional development on equity. He is exploring how emotional measures can help teachers to reflect on their practice.
Xinghua Li Visiting Scholar xli1@mit.edu		Xinghua Li is Associate Professor of Media Studies from Babson College. Born and raised in Shanghai, she finished her Ph.D. in Media Studies at the University of Iowa. Her research interests center on global consumerism and China, advertising and commercial media, and their relationship with desire and the environment. Her first book Environmental Advertising in China and the USA: The Desire to Go Green (Routledge 2016) conducts a cross-cultural comparison of green advertising and uses a combination of historical, rhetorical, and psychoanalytic methods to analyze the ideologies and structures of desire that drive Chinese and American consumers to “go green.” Li has also published in Media, Culture and Society, Environmental Communication, the anthology Reading Brokeback Mountain, and for three years she authored the "Looking Abroad" Column for The 21st Century, an English-language weekly in Beijing affiliated with the China Daily News Group. For her visiting period at CMS/W, Li will begin her second book project to explore contemporary Chinese consumers’ encounter with the “wild” through mass and digital media. Li is Chair of the Environmental Communication Division at the International Communication Association from 2018 to 2020, and the Founding Member of the International Environmental Communication Association.
Sandra Rodriguez Lecturer sanrodri@mit.edu		Sandra Rodriguez (Ph.D. University of Montreal) is a documentary-maker and a scholar. As a Sociologist of New Media Technology, her interests focus on understanding our relationship to new media developments, networked cultures, interactive and immersive technology and how they are used for social change. A SSHRC postdoctoral fellow, Dr Rodriguez is a lecturer and a public speaker on sociology of the web, new media trends and technologies. She has published a book and articles on social mobilization in network cultures and collaborates as consultant with NGOs and organizations focusing on Youth, media and public engagement. As a filmmaker, Sandra Rodriguez has directed, written and produced award winning documentary films broadcasted and exhibited internationally. In 2015, she authored and directed episode 05 of the interactive webseries Do Not Track (winner of a Peabody 2016), a personalized exploration of the web economy (dir. Brett Gaylor, co-produced Upian, ARTE, BR and NFB). She is currently a fellow at the MIT Open Doc Lab, where she pursues research-creation projects on rethinking impact, new storytelling forms and techniques.
José Ruipérez-Valiente Postdoctoral Associate jruipere@mit.edu		José A. Ruipérez-Valiente completed his B.Eng. and M.Eng. in Telecommunications at Universidad Católica de San Antonio de Murcia (UCAM) and Universidad Carlos III of Madrid (UC3M) respectively, graduating in both cases with the best academic transcript of the class. Afterwards, he completed his M.Sc. and P.hD. in Telematics at UC3M while conducting research at Institute IMDEA Networks in the area of learning analytics and educational data mining. During this time, he completed two research stays of three months each, the first one at MIT and the second one at the University of Edinburgh. He has received several academic and research awards and has published more than 25 scientific publications in important journals and conferences of his area of research. He has also held industry appointments at Vocento, Accenture and ExoClick, combining experience in academia, research institutions and business companies. Currently he is a postdoctoral associate at the CMS/W department at MIT where he is part of the Teaching Systems Lab and also collaborates with the Education Arcade in applying data science to large scale free online courses and to game-based environments to enhance human knowledge on how we learn. He is passionate about how learning occurs, solving data-based problems, teaching and sharing knowledge, yoga, nature and photography.
Greg Schwanbeck Visiting Lecturer schwan@mit.edu		Greg Schwanbeck is a visiting lecturer for MIT’s Scheller Teacher Education Program, teaching a three-course sequence in educational theory and practice (11.129-131). Greg draws on his more than 15 years of experience as a high school Physics teacher to inform his work in teacher training. In addition to his role with MIT, Greg works full-time at Westwood High School, where he teaches Physics and Astronomy to grades 11 and 12 and serves as an instructional technology coach tasked with helping colleagues capitalize on the district’s 1-to-1 Chromebook program. Greg is an Apple Distinguished Educator, a Google Educator, and a US Department of State Teachers for Global Classrooms fellow. Greg’s teaching methods and thoughts on educational technology have been featured nationally in publications such as The Huffington Post, EdSurge, and American Teacher: Heroes in the Classroom by Katrina Fried. Greg earned his master’s degree in Technology, Innovation, and Education at Harvard University and earned his bachelor’s degrees in Physics and Mathematics at Union College.
Carles Sora Domenjó Postdoctoral Associate csora@mit.edu		Carles Sora, a postdoctoral associate on a Fulbright grant with CMS/W's Open Documentary Lab, is a digital culture scholar at the Department of Communication of Pompeu Fabra University and a digital artist. He has been involved in several artistic, museum, and digital performance projects which have been exhibited at international conferences. Sora holds a Ph.D. and a M.S. in cognitive and interactive systems. His research interests are the impact of new immersive and interactive storytelling, temporal and spatial representations of digital media, interactive narratives, and digital arts. He has recently published a new book about digital temporalities in interactive narratives.