1997 PhD
Professor, Georgia Institute of Technology
After finishing her PhD in 1997, Amy came to work in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. Her research focused initially on the use of social computing technology for educational applications, and now focuses on social computing and CSCW more broadly. Amy and her students study existing collaborative computing applications, use what they learned to design new tools to foster collaboration, creativity and understanding; deploy those tools in the wild, and study them in use--to draw broader lessons for both theory and practice of social computing.
My experiences at the lab were fantastic for learning to think big, and get to know people I can learn from across industry and academia.
Amy's advice to current students? If you are thinking about an academic career, seek out additional coursework to give you a grounding in the basics that people coming out of more traditional PhD programs generally learn. Also, while you're at the lab, keep a personal diary of all the people you demo for. I wish I had done that.