Veronica Armour is a learning experience designer interested in the interplay between people, information, and innovation. She is the Associate Director for the Innovation, Design, & Entrepreneurship Academy (IDEA) at Rutgers University-New Brunswick where she also teaches part-time for the Information Technology and Informatics program at the School of Communication and Information. Her research interests include knowledge building, information experience, innovation, design science, and CSCL@Work.

Holly Avella is a Ph.D. graduate of the Rutgers University School of Communication and Information researching media and mental health, including social media mental health, therapeutic technologies, and digital health & mood tracking. Her work can be found in New Media & Society and Law and Society Review. Her book on social media mental health and therapy platforms is under contract with the University of California Press.

Bahar(eh) Badiei is a Ph.D. candidate in the Journalism and Media Studies Department. Her research examines the intersection of feminist media theory, dialectics/strategies of digital activism, and the SWANA region movements. Her work, in particular, explores how transnational diasporic projects mediate women’s struggles for liberation in Iran through datafied digital platforms. While accounting for the materiality of digital platforms and their data-driven economy, her research also reserves a space for ambivalences in visibility, activism, feminist performances, and resistance through digital media.

Yung-Ying Chang is a third-year PhD student in Sociology at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She is interested in consumers and consumption, political participation, nationalism, emotions, popular culture, and media and politics. Her current research explores how political consciousness, talk, and action emerge through people’s cultural consumption, such as the global consumption of K-pop, and what role emotions and online communities play in that process. The research also contextualizes the rarely examined emotional tension between people’s attachment to non-political objects and the desire for political engagement that can be found in multiple contexts.

Charles Chear is a Ph.D. student at Rutgers University School of Social Work. He studies social media use among immigrants to address family and community needs. He is interested in qualitative and natural language processing methods to do so. Hailing from Philadelphia's Cambodian refugee community, Charles worked as a social worker for several years.

Heather Davenport is a Ph.D. student in Communication, Information, and Media at Rutgers University. Her research interests include interpersonal and health communication, specifically processes of communicative resilience, narrative, and disclosure. 

Daniel Delmonaco is a third year PhD student at the University of Michigan School of Information. Daniel researches health information seeking, LGBTQ+ health, sex education, and social media content moderation. They use community-based and participatory research methods to develop inclusive health resources for LGBTQ+ young people.

Maria I. Espinoza is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at Rutgers University. Her research focuses on the communication of infectious diseases transmitted by mosquitoes and the uses of data for controlling epidemics. With Melissa Aronczyk, she's the author of A Strategic Nature: Public Relations and The Politics of American Environmentalism. This book looks at how promotional culture and information systems have shaped our understanding of environmental problems in the United States.

Dan Houli is a 4th year part-time Ph.D. student in Library and Information Science. Dan’s interests are in digital ethnographic research of online communities, particularly regarding the information behavior of online wellness communities.

Grant Lattanzi is a Ph.D. student in Communication, Information, and Media at  Rutgers. Grants research critically examines media technology in everyday life. His recent research projects have addressed an array of sociotechnical phenomena including election news seeking behavior, AI in creative labor, pediatric teletherapy, and temporal meaning making through internet memes. Grant holds an M.A. in Communication, Culture, and Technology from Georgetown University. He is co-host of the podcast, Media, Culture, and Why we feel like crying so much. Read more https://www.grantlattanzi.com/.

Yena Lee is a Ph.D. student in the Media, Technology, and Society program at Northwestern School of Communication. She is interested in studying the emerging forms and processes of networked social movement and the technological, political, and organizational conditions that enable or challenge the rise of such movements. Her research aims to better understand the changing logics of social movement at both levels of consciousness-raising and policymaking through an interdisciplinary and comparative lens. Her most recent research published in the Information, Communication & Society journal looks at the role of leadership in feminist networked social movements in South Korea. She has previously written about feminist activist chatbot in Brazil and feminist K-pop fan activism on Twitter.

Kaitlin Montague is a 4th year PhD Candidate at Rutgers University's School of Communication and Information in the Department of Library and Information Science. Her work focuses on Human Information Behavior. She is interested in the ways that concepts of place and space intersect with the ways that mobile populations search for information in transit. Kaitlin also holds a MI in Library and Information Science from Rutgers University.

Niki Natarajan is a PhD Candidate at the School of Communication and Information, Rutgers University. Niki specializes in audience research in the context of youth technology use. Niki earned her Master’s degree in integrated marketing communications from Northwestern University, and her Bachelor’s degree in Economics. She is a British Chevening scholar, and pioneered several newsroom innovations in India and the US prior to joining the PhD program at Rutgers. Fun Fact: Niki plays and teaches tennis.

Justine Quow is currently a Ph.D. student at Rutgers University, School of Communication and Information. Justine’s passion lies in researching the utilization of communicative technology, specifically social media, to improve community health and resilience.

Comfort is a Ph.D. student in the Journalism and Media Studies Department at Rutgers University's School of Communication and Information. Her research focuses on the interplay between social media, disinformation, and social movements and how these affect democratic processes in the Global North and Global South.

Kevin is a 4th year in the Communication, Information, and Media program with a concentration in Communication. Kevin’s area of research is in virtual reality and the induction of empathy.

Nicole E. Weber is a researcher, instructor, and librarian. She uses digital ethnographic and critical/cultural approaches to examine intersections between media, promotional culture and health and wellness. Currently, she is a PhD candidate in Media Studies at the Rutgers School of Communication and Information, and she also holds an MS in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.