Visiting Research Assistant (June 2018 – August 2018)

Michael was a Visiting Research Assistant at UNU Institute in Macau working on the EQUALS Project in the Gender Tech Lab. He is a Ph.D. student in the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Institute at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), where he studies the impact of social relationships on learning, in order to design more effective educaton technologies and learning environments. His work focuses on Information-Communication Technologies in developing contexts (ICTD), drawing on methods from HCI, Machine Learning, and social sciences.

Here at UNU Institute in Macau, he was studying barriers and opportunities for women’s participation in the global ICT workforce, specifically how the culture of online software developer communities may be particularly hostile to women, and how local tech hubs in developing contexts can provide incubators for ICT talent to better recruit and retain more women in ICT in the developing world.

Michael holds a Masters degree in Digital Media from Georgia Tech, and a Masters degree in Education from the University of Maryland. He is currently a fellow in the IES-funded Program for Interdisciplinary Education Research at CMU, and a project lead for the Metro21 Smart Cities Institute in Pittsburgh.

PROJECTS
During his time at UNU Institute in Macau, Michael was part of the following project:
EQUALS Research