One major outcome of the new faculty joining the Department of Media and Information this academic year that been a coming together of a critical mass of very strong faculty key to social scientific research on the digital age. Suddenly, the Quello Center can enjoy a dramatic rise in the strength of faculty that can inform research, policy, and practice central to the Center’s focus on policy for the digital age.
To ensure that these faculty are visible and recognized from afar, the Center has begun a new category of faculty, entitled Quello Research Fellows. The first four Fellows include three new faculty, Keith Hampton, Natascha Just, and David Ewoldsen, and one long-term member of the Quello faculty, Johannes Bauer. They bring major strengths in Internet studies, sociology, economics, social psychology, and policy into the Quello Center’s multidisciplinary team.
Together with our research team, associate faculty across the university, and graduate student researchers, these new Quello Research Fellows boost the capacity of the Quello Center to tackle an ever-wider range of research of importance to policy and practice for the digital age.
I fully expect this new class of faculty to help inform and lead debate over policy and practice that responds to the societal implications of the Internet and related digital media, communication, and information technologies.