Dr. Jeffrey Boase joins the Department of Communication at SC&I 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 Dr. 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. Dr. 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.