Staff
Like our students and faculty, CMS staff members come with an eclectic set of tastes, backgrounds and experiences -- from an internet entrepreneur to a game designer to a radio DJ. Together with faculty and students, they contribute to the creative vision of CMS and ensure that the academics, projects, and initiatives run smoothly.
Federico Casalegno, Ph.D., is the Director of the MIT Mobile Experience Lab and Associate Director of the MIT Design Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Since 2008, he is the director of the Green Home Alliance between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Fondazione Bruno Kessler in Italy. He is adjunct full professor at IMT Institute for Advanced Studies Lucca, Italy.
A social scientist with an interest in the impact of networked digital technologies in human behavior and society, Casalegno both teaches and leads advanced research at MIT, and design interactive media to foster connections between people, information and physical places using cutting-edge information technology.
Since 2004, he has also held a position as Lecturer at the MIT Media Lab Smart Cities group.
From 2004 to 2007, he worked at Motorola, Inc., as Technology and Product Innovation Analyst, designing pioneering products, experiences and services for mobile devices. Previously, from 1994 to 2000, he worked at Philips Design on connected communities and new media environments to inform design and product experience planning.
Casalegno holds a Ph.D. in Sociology of Culture and Communication from the Sorbonne University, Paris V, with a focus on mediated communication and social interaction in networked communities and wired cities.
He has published several scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals, books and articles. For the Living Memory, connected community project, he was awarded the Best Concept prize by the American Leading Industrial Designers I.D. Magazine, and the Silver Prize Design Concept by the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA).
A 2002 graduate from the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, VA, he received his Bachelor of Arts with a Literary & Cultural Studies concentration in Postmodern Literature, 'Cyberpunk' Science Fiction, and Contemporary Japanese Literature in Translation. His previous professional experience was as a Desktop and Lab Systems Technician for Lesley University in Cambridge, MA. The ending to Shadow of the Collossus made him cry.
Sviatlana Fahmy (Smashnaya) received her BA/MSW, MA in Education and MA in Psychology from Belarusian State Educational University and her Ph.D. in Sociology and Social Work from Boston University.
Sviatlana’s research and teaching interests include organizational performance, program evaluation, community engagement, sociology of the nonprofit sector, vulnerable populations, social service utilization and positive youth engagement. Her work was supported by fellowships from CEP, CATO, IHS, and BUSSW. For over 12 years Sviatlana has been involved in building nonprofit capacities and managing nonprofit projects in Belarus, Poland, Ukraine, Germany, Russia, Sweden, Canada and the US. Additionally, she served as a part-time faculty and a research scientist at Belarusian State Educational University, Boston University, Boston College, and Salem State College. She was also an external consultant for a number of projects conducted in cooperation with Wellesley College, Brandeis University, Boston University, Northeaster University and the Big Sister Big Brother Organization. Her most recent work “Building high-impact nonprofits” investigates the role of external and internal factors in shaping the performance of youth-oriented nonprofit organizations in social service provision in the transitional communities.
Dr. Kurt Fendt is Research Director in Foreign Languages and Literatures and the Comparative Media Studies Graduate Program (CMS). He is Director of the HyperStudio, a development laboratory for educational media projects in the humanities and co-Principal Investigator and Manager of the d'Arbeloff-funded Metamedia project. He has held Visiting Professorships at the University of Cologne, the Technical University of Aachen (both Germany), and the University of Klagenfurt, Austria; he was also Visiting Scientist at the Fraunhofer Institut in Sankt Augustin, Germany. His work includes the conceptualization and implementation of multimedia applications for the humanities, with a special focus on foreign-language and culture education, interaction design, and research on hypertext and narrative theory. Since 2005, he has been organizing the MIT Short Film Festival.
Fendt teaches several courses in the CMS Graduate Program, in Foreign Languages and Literatures, and the Literature Section. He is co- Director of "Berliner sehen", a collaborative hypermedia learning environment for German Studies, the on-line collaboration space for educators "Berliner sehen Exchange", and co-author of the French interactive narrative A la rencontre de Philippe (CD-ROM version). Before coming to MIT in 1993, Fendt was Assistant Professor in the Department of Applied Linguistics at the University of Bern in Switzerland, where he established the Media Learning Center for the Humanities and earned his Ph.D. in modern German literature with a thesis on hypertext and text theory in 1993 after having completed his MA at the University of Munich, Germany.
Generoso Fierro (Gene) is the Outreach Coordinator for the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, and works closely with our visiting scholars and research affiliates. Currently, Generoso is the membership director of the MIT radio station WMBR, where he is the longtime DJ of the program Generoso's Bovine Ska and Rocksteady. The show concentrates on the music of Jamaica prior to reggae (mento, ska and rocksteady) and has been on the air since 1997. A filmmaker and avid film fan, Gene recently finished a documentary on the legendary Jamaican guitarist Nearlin "Lynn" Taitt.
Gabriella Horvath is the Administrator at HyperStudio. 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 done research for the Independent Scholar program of Americans for the Arts, and has given lectures at Boston University on the role of the arts in urban revitalization.
Scot Osterweil is the Creative Director of the MIT Education Arcade and a research director in the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program. He is a designer of award-winning educational games, working in both academic and commercial environments, and his work has focused on what is authentically playful in challenging academic subjects. He has designed games for computers, handheld devices, and multi-player on-line environments. Scot is the creator of the acclaimed Zoombinis series of math and logic games, and leads a number of projects in the Education Arcade, including Vanished: The MIT/Smithsonian Curated Game (environmental science), Labyrinth (math), Kids Survey Network (data and statistics), Caduceus (medical science), and iCue (history and civics). He is a founding member, and Creative Director of the Learning Games Network where he leads the Hewlett Foundation’s Open Language Learning Initiative (ESL).
Courses: CMS.S60/CMS.S96 Special Subject: Games for Social Change
Steve Pomeroy is the lead mobile developer and a researcher at the Mobile Experience Lab at MIT. He has a B.S. in Computer Science from the Rochester Institute of Technology where he studied computer language construction and computer system security. His research interests include mobile software and interfaces, communication protocols, physical computing, and free/open source software.
Before his work at the Mobile Experience Lab, Steve worked at France Telecom Research & Design Boston, a part of Orange Labs in Cambridge, Massachusetts. There, he worked on variety of projects, including: indoor spatial positioning; context-aware mobile interfaces; mesh-network topology reconstruction; interactive dialog-oriented interfaces; a communication protocol and service for interacting with personal geo-spatial context; and a hybrid phone-web interface prototype. In his free time he enjoys dabbling in numerous creative fields including photography, woodworking, and digital electronics design.
Douglas Purdy is the Manager of the Humanities Film Office. He is also the teaching assistant for Kung Fu Cinema: Transnational Perspectives. Purdy has been a DJ at WZBC's Beyond the QE2: Future Funk Radio, one of Boston's longest-running dance shows. He has completed a horror novel and is currently plodding through the second. His most recent publication was in the small press anthology, Vivisections.
Brad Seawell coordinates the MIT Communications Forum and helps to promote and organize some CMS public events including the media-in-transition conferences. He is associate editor of the media-in-transition anthologies Rethinking New Media: The Aesthetics of Transition and Democracy and New Media. Prior to working at MIT, he was an editor at Banker & Tradesman, a business weekly based in Boston.
Prior to working for CMS, Becky Shepardson was an administrative assistant for the Computer Science and AI Lab at MIT. She continues to work part-time as an editorial assistant for the theoretical computer science journal Information and Computation. Becky holds a master’s degree in Applied Linguistics from Boston University.
A one-time high school English and History teacher, his sound design, music and mix work can be heard on a variety of educational videos, long and short form documentary films, various promotional shorts, and on the Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim animated series Assy McGee. Abe is primarily interested in understanding the interrelationship of sports, sports games and rituals.
Philip Tan is the executive director for the US operations of the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, a game research initiative hosted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is concurrently a project manager for the Media Development Authority (MDA) of Singapore.
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 Animation & Games Industry Development section of MDA. He has 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.
Courses: CMS.608/CMS.864 Game Design; CMS.611/6.073 Creating Videogames
Jessica Tatlock joined CMS in July 2009 after working as Project Associate at Project New Media Literacies. She 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. As NML Project Associate, Jessica manages the details behind the scenes at NML. She has an M.Ed in Cultural Diversity and Curriculum Reform from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and lives in Brookline with her two school-aged children.
Andrew conducts the communications efforts for CMS (websites, press relations, and project and event publicity) as well as those for MIT's Center for Civic Media and the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab.
A native of Washington, D.C., he holds a degree in communication from Wake Forest University and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Emerson College. His marketing and P.R. skills were honed at Houghton Mifflin and Tufts University. He was also the long-time fiction editor for Identity Theory and developed a literary aggregation website, archived at Readsfeed.com.
As the program manager for CMS, Sarah Wolozin manages the financial, research, and personnel administration as well as development and outreach for the program.
She has produced documentaries and educational media for a wide variety of media outlets including PBS, History Channel, Learning Channel, NPR, and various websites and educational technologies. Her work includes an episode of the PBS series, America’s Sorting Machine: Unequal Access to College, and the last episode of the PBS series, This Far By Faith: African-American Spiritual Journeys and the Peabody-winning series, I’ll Make Me A World: African-American Arts where she served as associate producer. She started experimenting with the web back in 1996 and developed and produced an award-winning interactive website, Cybertimes of Reginald. Whatever the platform, her main interest is in enabling diversity of voice and provoking thoughtful discussion and action through a good story.