danah boyd

danah boyd

danah boyd is a social media researcher at Microsoft Research and a Fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Her research focuses on how people integrate technology into their everyday practices. She has been analyzing different social media phenomena for almost a decade.

Dr. boyd received her Ph.D. from the School of Information at the University of California-Berkeley. Her dissertation “Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics” examined teen engagement with social network sites like MySpace and Facebook. Her work was part of a MacArthur Foundation-funded project on digital youth and informal learning. The findings of this project are documented in the co-authored book Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media.

At the Berkman Center, danah co-directed the Internet Safety Technical Task Force to help identify risks and potential technical solutions for keeping children safe online. With support from the MacArthur Foundation, danah and her Berkman colleagues have created a Youth and Media Policy Initiative to further examine how research can inform policy.

Dr. boyd received a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Brown University and a master’s degree in sociable media from MIT Media Lab. She has worked as a researcher for various corporations, including Intel, Tribe.net, Google, and Yahoo! She sits on corporate, education, and non-profit advisory boards, and regularly speaks at industry conferences and events. She also created and managed a large online community for V-Day, a non-profit organization working to end violence against women and girls worldwide.

Dr. boyd actively shares her research on her blog (http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts) and via Twitter (@zephoria).