A full professor and five new assistant professors will join the School of Information faculty in Fall 2018.

Barbara Ericson, assistant professor, comes to UMSI from Georgia Tech, where she received her PhD in Human Centered Computing. Her work to improve the quality and quantity of secondary computing teachers has become a national model for professional development. She helped lead the Expanding Computing Education Pathways (ECEP) NSF Alliance, which has helped 16 states and Puerto Rico improve their computing education efforts and policies. She holds two patents for her work in case-based reasoning.

Barbara Ericson will be teaching SI 206, Data-Oriented Programming, this fall.

Gabriela Marcu joins UMSI as assistant professor. Her research combines community-based participatory research, interaction design, and ubiquitous computing to promote coordination and equity in the delivery of behavioral health services. Her research on user experience and social impact has been funded by the NSF, NIH, and CDC, among other organizations. She holds a PhD in Human-Computer Interaction from Carnegie Mellon University. She has worked to promote the participation of underrepresented groups in computing in K-12 education.

Mustafa Naseem begins at UMSI as a clinical assistant professor. He is an educator, product designer and social entrepreneur who uses digital technology to help solve global development challenges. His recent work addresses improving public service delivery in global health, and water and sanitation sectors. Mustafa has taught in six countries in Africa, Asia and North America. He received his master’s degree in ICTD from the ATLAS Institute on a Fulbright Scholarship.

Mustafa Naseem is teaching SI 430, Information Technology and Global Society, in the fall semester and SI 622, Needs Assessment and Usability Evaluation in the winter semester.

UMSI also welcomes two researchers as new Presidential Post-doctoral Fellows this fall.

Julie Hui, assistant professor and Presidential Post-doctoral Fellow, was a research fellow at UMSI in 2017/18. She worked in the Social Innovations Group, working with small business owners and community organizations in Detroit to develop accessible pathways to employment. She received her PhD at Northwestern University and her bachelor’s in physics from MIT. She develops theory and practice human-centered design informed by research in human-computer interaction, crowdsourcing, social computing, and learning sciences.

Oliver Haimson joins UMSI as assistant professor and Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow. His social computing research examines online identity, gender, and emotional health and wellbeing during life transitions, as presented on social media. He received his PhD from the Informatics Department at University of California, Irvine’s Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences. He is a recipient of a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.

Ron Eglash, a pioneering scholar in the fields of ethnocomputing and ethnomathematics, joins the UMSI faculty as a professor this fall. See separate story.

- UMSI News Service