Brittany Andersen is a PhD candidate in the Emerging Media Studies (EMS) program at Boston University College of Communication. At BU, her research focuses on how users perceive, evaluate, and respond to different types of media and technology. Throughout the program, Andersen has led workshop sessions and tutorials on social media data analytics and visualization, and given guest lectures on emerging media at local Massachusetts universities. Her most recent publication includes how individuals discuss emerging health technologies, such as genetic testing for health information, on social media. Andersen currently works as a User Experience Researcher at Ancestry, where she provides UX research and consulting for the company’s new and proposed product and technology lines. While working at Ancestry, Andersen is simultaneously working on her dissertation, which focuses on user motivations and barriers to partake in direct-to-consumer genetic testing. Andersen hopes to complete her dissertation research by the end of 2019.

Ashley Benitez is a junior at Tufts University majoring in Community Health. She has experience with research as an intern at the MGH Health Disparities Research Unit. Ashley has also collaborated with Dr. Shalini Tendulkar, as a student in her community-based participatory research course. In this course, Ashley is working with Dr. Tendulkar, other undergraduates and community partners on a CBPR project that focuses on exploring the experiences of immigrant families within the Somerville Public School system. The goal of the project is to identify strengths and areas for improvement in the educational system. In addition, Ashley is a Tisch Summer Scholar and is active in other ways on and off campus.

Japonica Brown-Saracino is Professor of Sociology at Boston University. An ethnographer, she has published widely on cities, gentrification, sexualities, culture, and identity. She is the author of A Neighborhood That Never Changes: Gentrification, Social Preservation, and the Search for Authenticity, which received the Urban Affairs Association Best Book Award, and editor of the Gentrification Debates. Her most recent book, How Places Make Us: Novel LBQ Identities in Four Small Cities, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2018. At BU she directs the Urban Inequalities Workshop, sponsored by the Initiative on Cities.

Katrina Burgess is Associate Professor of Political Economy. Before joining the Fletcher faculty, she taught at Syracuse (the Maxwell School), Brown, UCLA, and the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico (ITAM). She is author of Parties and Unions in the New Global Economy, which won the 2006 Outstanding Book Award for the best publication on labor issues granted by the Section on Labor Studies and Class Relations of the Latin American Studies Association, and co-editor with Abraham F. Lowenthal of The California-Mexico Connection. Her current project addresses the impact of migration and remittances on the quality of democracy in developing countries. She has also served as Assistant Director of the U.S.-Mexico Project at the Overseas Development Council in Washington, D.C. and Associate Director of the California-Mexico Project at USC in Los Angeles.

L. Kelly Fitzpatrick is an open access and digital collections specialist living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is a Research Associate at the Harvard Library Innovation Lab working on the Caselaw Access Project. Kelly graduated with a B.A. from Hampshire College in 2013 and an M.S. from Simmons College School of Library and Information Science in 2015.

Dr. Melanie Kimball is Associate Professor and Director of the School Library Teacher concentration at Simmons University. She received her M.S. and Ph.D. In addition to articles in Library Trends, Public Libraries, and Teacher-Librarian, among others, she recently Co-edited and wrote a chapter for Engaging Teens with Story: How to Inspire and Educate Youth with Storytelling. The book received the School Library Connection/American Reference Book Annual 2018 Best Professional Resource for School or Youth Librarians.

Belle Lipton’s background is in the digital humanities. In addition to a skill set centered on history and library sciences, Belle has advanced technical experience in geospatial and data sciences. Her passion is bringing together disparate historical sources — maps, photographs, manuscripts, government records, and so on — and uniting them using powerful location software. She enjoys designing web applications that allow patrons to discover and explore historical maps in a digital environment that feels both intuitive and familiar.

Jessica Parr is a Lecturer in the History Department at Simmons University in Boston, MA. She is a historian who specializes in the Early Modern Black Atlantic, Memory Studies, and the Digital Humanities. She received her PhD in History from the University of New Hampshire at Durham in 2012. She has worked on a number of digital projects, including serving as editor of The Programming Historian, a contributor to Black Perspectives and The Junto, and as a Project Assistant for the PLACE Project, a $1.3 million IMLS-funded project to build a geoportal to make digital collections searchable by location. Parr has been the recipient of a number of fellowships and grants, including the North American Council for British Studies, Gilder-Lehrman, the Boston Athenaeum, Mystic Seaport, the John Hope Franklin Research Institute of Duke University, the Congregational Library, and the Methodist Archives of Drew University. Parr is also an elected fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Her first book, Inventing George Whitefield: Race, Revivalism, and the Making of a Religious Icon was published by the University Press of Mississippi in 2015.

Michelle Pearse is the Senior Research and Data Librarian at Harvard Law School Library where she supports researchers generally and has a developing focus on data-related search. Her previous positions at the Harvard Law School Library include Research Librarian for Open Access & Scholarly Communication and Bibliographer for Anglo-American Law. Previously, she was Faculty Research/Legal Instruction Library at the Northeastern University School of Law Library. She has also worked for the Boston Public Library, Emmanuel College Library, and the University of Connecticut School of Law Library. Michelle holds an M.L.I.S. from Simmons and a J.D. from Suffolk University Law School.

Allison Posey participates in curricular design, online course instruction, and leads professional learning programs, including the CAST UDL Symposium. She works with educators to integrate and apply current understandings from brain research about learning into instructional practices so that all learners are able to access, integrate and become expert learners. Prior to coming to CAST, Allison was a life science teacher in high school and community college settings, teaching genetics, anatomy, physiology, biology, neuroscience, and psychology. She received a degree in Mind, Brain, and Education from Harvard Graduate School of Education where she also worked as a teaching fellow for courses such as Educational Neuroscience and Framing Scientific Research for Public Understanding. She holds a Certificate in Fine Arts from the Maryland Institute of Art.

Amber Stubbs is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Mathematics and Computer Science at Simmons University in Boston, MA. graduated from Simmons University in 2005 with an B.S. in Computer Science and English, then attended Brandeis University where she earned her Ph.D. in Computer Science, doing research in the field of natural language processing. She is the co-author of the book Natural Language Annotation for Machine Learning (O’Reilly, 2012) with James Pustejovksy. Amber became an Assistant Professor at Simmons University in 2014, where she teaches courses in both the Computer Science and LIS programs.

Shalini A. Tendulkar, ScD, ScM is a Lecturer in the Department of Community Health at Tufts University. She is particularly committed to community-based participatory research and has extensive experience conducting research, evaluation and needs assessment work in collaboration with community and academic partners. Shalini’s work has privileged her with the opportunity to work on a range of community and public health topics in diverse settings. She has also published her research and evaluation work in peer-reviewed journals and presented in local and national settings, often in collaboration with her community partners. Shalini received her undergraduate degree from Wellesley College and her Masters and Doctorate in Maternal and Child Health from the Harvard School of Public Health.