Featured Undergrads

Michael Danziger combines a BA in physics from Boston University with extensive work at the Massachusetts College of Art in printmaking, but his primary interest is in the application of interactive computer graphics to problems in knowledge and information transfer. Since graduation, he has been working as a software developer at the MIT Center for Educational Computing Initiatives, developing classroom-ready educational physics visualizations and simulations as part of Physics professor John Belcher's TEAL (Technology Enhanced Active Learning) Project. Expanding on that work, he has more recently joined forces with a group under biology professor Graham Walker to develop an educationally friendly molecular visualization tool. At CMS, Danziger hopes to continue his study of fields such as information visualization, visual perception, and digital media, in an attempt to better understand how their principles can be exploited and synthesized to create more effective and practical visualizations for the purposes of education, entertainment, and aesthetics.

Jin Liwen hails from China, where she received her undergraduate degree in media and communications from Nanjing University followed up by studies in American politics and history and international relations at the Johns Hopkins University-Nanjing University Center for Chinese and American Studies. She interned in the news commentary division at China's largest media organization, China Central Television (CCTV), and worked as a journalist at News Probe, an investigative documentary series that addressed the problems of marginal populations such as homosexuals and AIDS patients. This experience encouraged Liwen to turn her academic work towards a critical investigation of the relationship between various media forms (traditional media, blogs and online bulletin board systems) and the development of a democratic culture and public sphere. At CMS, she is eager to continue her research into the role of media in facilitating political democratization and international cultural understanding.

Andres Alberto Lombana graduated in 2003 with a double BA in political science and literature from Colombia's Universidad de los Andes. His interests are emphatically cross-media, and he has some significant experience with educational media applications. From 2001 to 2005, Andres worked for the Fundacion Universitaria Iberoamericana (FUNIBER), a Spanish electronic learning company active in Latin America. There, he administered and edited e-learning objects that were both adaptive and migratory, and worked to develop learning communities. He was awarded a fellowship to spend 8 months at FUNIBER's Barcelona headquarters where he worked on digital layout and publishing processes. Outside of the work environment, Andres has been active in small-scale cross-media creative activities including movies, music, still images, and text. In 2001, he co-founded Elektrodomestika, a cross-media laboratory which explores and experiments with the use of new technologies in art creation. His latest project, Cotidianity, is a computer operetta that explores digital storytelling. His digital video The Duel (stop motion animation) was selected as part of the first Latin American and Caribbean Video Art Competition, and shown in the International Development Bank's art gallery in Washington and the Ethnologischen Museum of Berlin. Interactive media production, creative educational strategies, and the discourse of globalization combine to form the core of what Lombana would like to pursue at CMS.

Debora Lui is a 2003 alumna of MIT with a double major in architecture and management science, and a minor in theater. Deb has long been fascinated by the relationship between space and performance. As an undergraduate, Deb explored this interest by working as a researcher with the Interactive Cinema Group at the MIT Media Lab, and through the MIT Eloranta Undergraduate Research Fellowship, studying the relationship between performance and architecture in theater. Following graduation, Deb has gained experience in the arts (working at the Tony Award-winning Berkeley Repertory Theatre) and design (with Tom Ip & Partners Architects in Hong Kong). She has continued to pursue her interest in theater by working with several amateur and semi-professional performing groups as a director and an actor.

At CMS, Deb is interested in exploring the history of spectatorship and the sensory interfaces that audiences use to engage with media, particularly in how they can relate to our connection to architecture and our physical environment. Currently, she works as a research assistant with the New Media Literacies group and as a media analyst with the Convergence Culture Consortium at CMS.

Stephen J. Schultze holds a 2002 BA in computer science and philosophy from Calvin College (Grand Rapids, MI). Schultze has also served as a project director for nonprofit startup Public Radio Exchange and collaborated on projects at the MIT Media Lab. He organized the 2007 Beyond Broadcast conference which brought CMS together with Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society and the Yale Information Society Project. In the summer of 2007, he worked as a Legal Assistant for Google's Public policy team in Washington, DC. His research interests focus on the changing nature of communications regulation in the broadband era. His blog is called Managing Miracles.

Evan Wendel graduated with a BS in physics from Hobart College in 2004, and since arriving at CMS he has been working with the Education Arcade to create masochistically challenging puzzles for the web-based game Labyrinth, which is designed to supplement middle school math and literacy curriculum. After discovering that he’s not much of a gamer anymore, he decided to scrap his initial thesis ideas related to games, and focus on his true passion: beer cats independent music!

In the coming year Evan plans on putting together a thesis investigating the exciting new possibilities for “independent” music making, especially in the context of ‘new’ online social networks, like MySpace Music and Last-FM, and within networked culture more generally. His hope is that this project will land him a high-paying desk job at a ‘major’ record label, preferably EMI, if only because they don't seem to like DRMs much either. Evan also maintains a blog, “A Distorted Reality,” for publicly sharing thesis related nonsense, as well as for posting playlists and podcasts from his super awesome radio show, which airs on WMBR, Cambridge. In his spare time he listens to a lot of music and frequents his vacation home in Rochester, New York.

Huma Yusuf graduated from Harvard in 2002 with a degree in English and American Literature, and returned to Pakistan to work as a journalist. She specializes in writing about social trends as represented in media and media and society issues, in addition to addressing subjects such as low-income housing, 'honor' killings, gang wars and the state's ineffective prosecution of rape cases. Her writing garnered the UNESCO/Pakistan Press Foundation 'Gender in Journalism 2005' Award and the European Commission's 2006 Natali Lorenzo Prize for Human Rights Journalism. Yusuf is interested in investigating the interface among media, local politics and global trends - an intersection that she will explore through sites such as community radio, trends in media consumption, and online environments. With the support of the Higher Education Commission of Pakistan, she is currently launching a first-of-its-kind webzine, the goal of which is to provide an alternate forum where journalists, academics, and media students can examine and critique the Pakistani media industry at large.

Born and raised in Kolkata, India, Abhimanyu Das graduated in 2005 with a BA in English from Franklin and Marshall College. Gradually, his interests in new kinds of media texts (such as computer games, graphic novels, and serialized fiction) began to push against the outer limits of proscribed curriculum of his English department. His struggles with core questions about transmedia storytelling, the audiovisual elements of texts and social context of genre narratives led him to develop a secondary concentration in Film Studies, during which he did archival research at the British Film Institute and also read a lot of comics. His relevant professional experience includes writing about film and literature as well as a brief stint in publishing.

At MIT, he hopes to pursue a thesis project that studies “the confluence of post-colonial influences and the effect of globalization on two rapidly expanding media movements, the Indian independent film and the Indian comic book.” He is currently working at the MIT Center for Future Civic Media as an RA. His long-term goal is to be able to make a living as a cultural journalist with the clout to make a few people do more than just smile indulgently while he talks about movies and comics.

Joshua Diaz went from a BA in Liberal Arts from St. John’s College (2004) to working within the computer games industry. His game industry experiences include working in QA at Electronic Arts’ Los Angeles Studio, serving as systems designer for the PlayStation 2 title The Sopranos: Road to Respect, and working as a game designer for DS platform games at Seven Studios. Diaz reports that “the rigorous and interdisciplinary approach [he was taught in the St. John’s “Great Books” program] would later be of great benefit, as I found game design almost always involves negotiating between aesthetic and technological requirements and in translating principles from one field into others.” His academic interests focus on exploring the relationship between video games and cognition, in studying the relations between amateur and professional practitioners, and in developing new ways to talk, think and teach learning.

Kevin Driscoll earned his BA in Visual Art from Assumption College in 2002. He joins CMS after three years teaching Computer Science at Prospect Hill Academy Charter School in Cambridge, MA. There he explored issues of identity management, media production, literacy, hacking, and hip-hop with the consistently brilliant students in grades 6-12. Inspired by a challenging first year in the classroom, Kevin co-founded a non-profit organization called TeachForward (later re-named Developing Curriculum, Inc.) to encourage the sharing and development of high-quality, free learning materials on the web. In addition to his work in education. Kevin is a frequent collaborator with internet-based artist Claire Chanel and a hip-hop dj responsible for Gold Chain and Todo Mundo events. His website can be found at http://kevindriscoll.info.

Colleen Kaman comes to MIT with a strong interest in ethnography and the intersection of media, politics, and democracy. Colleen is an Emmy-nominated journalist and documentary filmmaker whose work has aired on Chicago Public Radio, National Geographic Explorer, Showtime, HBO, NBC, ABC, and CNN. Her professional work has included stories about publicly funded private education, alleged mercy killings in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Europe. She has directed two short films and taught nonfiction filmmaking in India. Colleen has also produced and directed commercial radio, television, and web production for state and federal political campaigns. She holds a B.A. in cultural anthropology from Bates College.

While at CMS, Colleen is working as a researcher with the MIT Center for Future Civic Media. She is also exploring the creation of narrative and identity across media, communication regulation and the role of new technologies in community, and information design.

Before coming to MIT, Ana Domb Krauskopf worked as a journalist, producer and arts manager in her native Costa Rica. Ana’s work has always revolved around the creative industries. In 2003, she collaborated with film historian María Lourdes Cortes to create Cinergia, the first film production fund designed to stimulate media activity in Central America and Cuba, and coordinated the project until June 2007. She has also worked with the Papaya Music label in research, marketing, corporate sales, fundraising, public relations and concert and CD production. In early 2006, she co-produced the Papaya Fest, the first Central American music festival, with Luciano Capelli. This large-scale event involved more than 70 musicians and diverse styles ranging from Belizean rap, to Costa Rican acid jazz and Panamanian pop. Ana’s research interests include alternative distribution and consumption of creative goods and how they relate to the production process.

Lan Xuan Le, who has BAs in both Biology and Asian Studies from Swarthmore College (2004) and a Masters in Public Health from Boston University (2007), has been part of the “games for health movement,” conducting a qualitative study and co-authoring a white paper for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation on the use of games to combat childhood obesity. She also has a strong interest in the globalization of media and the construction of alternative understandings of what it means to be Asian and Asian-American through popular culture, an interest which led her to design, research and execute a library exhibition of anime and manga for Swarthmore’s McCabe Library. She wrote an undergraduate thesis on problematic gender and sexual representations in Japanese popular culture with a particular focus on Card Captor Sakura, a paper which won the Swarthmore College Asian Studies Program’s top writing prize.

Xiaochang Li completed a BA at New York University in 2006, where she wrote an undergraduate thesis on narrative structure in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time while also exploring various aspects of media production through internships in film production, publishing, and web design and advertising. She then spent the interim year in Germany on fellowship through the Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange, where she spent her time working with independent film production firms in Berlin and Saarbrücken and going 220km per hour on the autobahn.

Her current research interests include the emergence of narrative forms in the digital landscape that shift our understanding of, and interaction with, the structure of texts and the relationships of gender and sexual performativity between Eastern and Western media through the lens of fan-generated content. In the future, she hopes to see Roland Barthes resurrected from the dead to author a book about YouTube that consists entirely of a series of semi-related Cat Macros.

Jason Rockwood studied communication theory and video games as an undergraduate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research there explored the social and psychological demographics of gay video game players. Currently, he is interested in understanding the functioning of real estate markets in virtual economies. Jason has been quoted in magazines such as Details, Salon.com, Kotaku, Joystiq and The Advocate. He lives in Cambridge with his dog, Nibbles.

Talieh Rohani studied filmmaking at Soureh University in Tehran, Iran, before going on to do a BFA in Image Arts/Film Studies at Ryerson University in Toronto and to pursue an MFA in Cinema Studies at San Francisco State University. She has directed four short films and worked, variously, as a director, art director and production designer, cinematographer and editor. She is interested in the emergence post-revolutionary popular culture in lives of young Iranian women and in the larger impact of technology on the development of a new global imagination. She sees CMS as a place to broaden and strengthen the ideas and skills that she hopes to bring back to her flimmaking practice.

Lauren Silberman graduated with a BA in English from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she also spent four years as a research assistant in the Games, Learning, and Society program. Using commercial sport video games as a model, her core research investigates how sport video games mediate athletes’ physical play. She has observed and interviewed numerous professional and college level athletes about their virtual game-play. Other research interests include developing effective business models and strategies for companies in an ever changing media landscape and understanding the effect Web _.0 is having on our social interactions and public identities. Her research has been published in The Journal of Physical Education and she has presented her research in various forums throughout the United States and abroad. She has worked for NBC and other leading media companies as a researcher and project assistant.

Deja Elana Swartz grew up on a houseboat in Miami, Florida. She graduated with a B.A. with Highest Honors in English from the University of Florida in 2002. After graduation, she taught high school English in Houston, Texas as part of Teach For America. She’s also worked in nonprofit development and in autism education and research.

Here at CMS, she is a researcher specializing in learning and user insights at Project New Media Literacies and serves as the liaison to the Harvard GoodPlay Project. She is fascinated by taste-making. Her own tastes currently include nail-art, knock-off fashion, fast food breakfast sandwiches, soap opera comic strips, and Tolstoy.

hitney Anne Trettien, who holds a B.A. in both English and Philosophy from Hood College (2007), spent her time as an undergraduate studying early English literature, continental and post-modern philosophy, as well as Latin, Old English, and Ancient Greek. Outside the classroom, she wrote extensively for online indie rock publications, edited webzines, and designed clothing for her internet company Moonslush. Unexpected commonalities between her academic research and the online communities she was involved with sparked her ongoing interest in the relationship between early oral narratives and the so-called “secondary orality” produced in digital culture.

Trettien is also a Truman Scholar and a political activist, having worked with the Green Party, Amnesty International, Women in Black, ACORN, and the Pro-Literacy Council, among other groups. She recently edited an anthology of stories, poems, photography, and artwork from the American peace movement entitled Cost of Freedom, which was published by Howling Dog Press in 2007.