I am an Assistant Professor in the Communication, Culture and Technology Program at Georgetown University, and affiliate faculty in the Department of Computer Science and the Program in Learning and Design. I am also co-director of CCT’s Technology Design Studio, a collaborative design space where students and faculty work together to develop new ideas.

My research is interdisciplinary and at the crossroads of Design, Computing, Systems Science and Education. In particular, I focus on the concept of scale and how it is employed to both define and solve problems. My fundamental belief is that the holistic systems view of world is a common way of thinking in both the arts and sciences, that design offers a set of methods which are particularly useful for analyzing and building those systems, and that computational media provides an essential set of tools for developing and testing those solutions. My goal is to develop multi-scale methods, ways of decomposing problematic situations into discrete hierarchies, that provide new perspectives on these situations and suggest more productive ways of dealing with them. I refer to this approach as Recursive Design. 

As an educator I try to teach students how to employ the same kinds of interdisciplinary approaches that have proven so effective for me. This includes the domain knowledge and core concepts from these disciplines that are inescapable, but also the work styles and habits of mind that are essential to getting results. I hope to understand how these different approaches and skillsets can be brought together to create new forms of learning and new kinds of learners.