Staff

Director

James E. Katz, Ph.D., is professor and chair of the Department of Communication at Rutgers University where he also directs the Center for Mobile Communication Studies. Katz holds the rank of Professor II, Rutgers’ highest professorial rank and which is reserved for those who have achieved national and international eminence in their field.

Professor Katz has devoted much of his career to exploring the social consequences of new communication technology, especially the mobile phone and Internet. Currently he is looking at how personal communication technologies can be used by teens from urban environments to engage in informal science and health learning. This research is being carried out through an NSF-sponsored project with New Jersey’s Liberty Science Center.

Among his recent awards are the 2009 Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Twentieth Century Communications History (Italy) and election as Fellow of the AAAS, one of America’s most important scientific societies. Other awards include Bellcore’s Distinguished Member of Staff Award, a Mellon Foundation Scholar award, and the Distinguished Scholar Award of the Society for the Social Study of Mobile Communication.

Katz has been granted two patents in the telecommunication realm and has won post-doctoral fellowships at Harvard and MIT. He is also the author of more than 50 refereed journal articles. His books, which include Magic in the Air: Mobile Communication and the Transformation of Social Life and Social Consequences of Internet Use: Access, Involvement, Expression, have been translated into Chinese, Italian, Japanese and Spanish. His latest volume, published by MIT Press, is Handbook of Mobile Communication Studies.

Prior to coming to Rutgers, Professor Katz headed the social science research unit at Bell Communications Research. Among the schools at which Katz has taught is University of Texas, Austin, where he also served as chair of the Austin World Affairs Council. Katz is frequently interviewed about his research by the press, including the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, as well as network news programs and PBS NewsHour. For more media coverage on Professor Katz, please check News Regarding the Center.

Deputy Director

Jeffrey Boase [2008-]
Jeffrey Boase, Ph.D., joins the Department of Communication at SCILS having most recently held the position of postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Social Psychology at the University of Tokyo. His research focuses on how individuals use the internet and mobile phones to maintain and build their personal networks, and how they integrate these media into their daily lives. To investigate these issues Professor Boase has co-designed several large-scale surveys in America, Canada and Japan. His most recent work examines the social utility of web-enabled mobile phones in Japan, with a focus on how personal network dynamics shape the extent to which this technology is used to bridge and bond with social ties. Professor. Boase has published over a dozen scholarly articles, and he has been awarded fellowships from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and National Center for Digital Government at Harvard University.

Research Associates

Mark Aakhus [2004-]
Mark Aakhus, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of the Department of Communication at Rutgers University. His work focuses on the emergence and management of conflicts that arise as people attempt to make decisions, solve problems, and learn. He investigates the practices and technologies people implement to regulate and shape their communication and the consequences for how people interact and reason with each other when facing complex situations.

Among the real world sites that he investigate are organizations trying to develop workable information systems, decision-makers trying to sort out disagreement among experts, groups trying to formulate collective action, communities grappling with development issues, couples trying to negotiate divorce settlements, households trying to coordiCraig R. Scottnate the rush of life, and individuals searching for the meaning of good work in their professional practice.

Common among these is a concern with the role and nature of communication to resolve these complex situations. This work connects theory and research on argumentation and social interaction to explain decision-making, conflict resolution, technology, and the organization of work.

Professor Aakhus' empirical investigations point to the significant attention in contemporary society given to designing communication. This yearning to design communication does not mean, however, that design activity is reflective about the assumptions implemented when people attempt to regulate and shape communication through procedures and technologies. Toward this end, he has, along with his colleagues, begun to further articulate key concepts and premises for understanding communication as an object of design and a process of design.

Jennifer Gibbs [2004-]
Jennifer Gibbs, Ph.D, is an Assistant Professor of the Department of Communication at Rutgers University. Her research interests include Global virtual teams, globalization, organizational culture, identification and self-presentation in virtual contexts (e.g., global teams, online dating, social networking sites), social impacts of new technologies on interpersonal and work relationships

Craig Scott [2006-]
Craig Scott, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of the Department of Communication at Rutgers University. He also is the Director of the Ph.D. Program in Communication and Information at the univeresity. His research interests include Organizational communication, New communication technologies, Issues of work-related identification, Anonymity, and Communication theory

Kalpana David [2004-]
Kalpana Thomas (nee David) has a Ph.D (2007) from SCILS. Her dissertation advisor was Professor James Katz and her dissertation committee consisted of Professors Nick Belkin, John Pavlik and Karen Cerulo (Department of Sociology, Rutgers). She has a B.S. in Physics (1999) and an M.A. in Communication (2001) from Madras University, India. She is interested in social consequences of communication technology, particularly mobile communication technology. She works for Mediavision, a New York – based broadcast media company as VP of Global Business Development.

Katie Lever-Mazzuto [2005-]
Katie Lever-Mazzuto is an Assistant Professor at Western Connecticut State University in Danbury, Connecticut. Her research interests include the social implications of technology use. More specifically, she is interested in how mobile technologies, such as digital music devices and mobile phones areused in public environments. She completed her Ph.D. at Rutgers University.

Satomi Sugiyama [2004-]
Satomi Sugiyama is currently an assistant professor at Franklin College Switzerland. Her research interests include communication technologies, fashion and communication, and intercultural communication. She is particularly interested in the influence of mobile communication technologies on social behaviour in a global context. She holds a doctorate in Communication from Rutgers University.

Ran Wei [2009-]
Ran Wei, Ph.D. is professor in School of Journalism & Mass Communications at the University of South Carolina. His major research interests are in communication technologies, mobile communication, and media effects. He is a pioneering scholar in the study of mobile telephony and his work on user perceptions of cell phone attributes is widely cited. He edited a special issue on mobile telephony in Asia for Media Asia in 2009. He earned his Ph.D. in mass communication from Indiana University in 1995.

Soo-Yeon Hwang [2007-]
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Chih-Hui Lai [2006-]
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Sun Kyong Lee [2007-]
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Colleen Bloom [2007-2008]
Yi-Fan Chen, PhD [2004-2008]
Sinuk Kang [2005]
Chia-Chien (Emily) Liang [2005]
Patricia Mechael, Ph.D.[2007-2008]
Dan Su [2004-2008]
Shenwei Zhao [2004-2005]

Last Updated:: November 3, 2009