SILS Welcomes
Five New Faculty Members SAYAMINDU DASGUPTA Sayamindu Dasgupta develops new tools and experiences that support young learners in creating, thinking, and learning with data so that they can be active and empowered participants in the data-driven and data-mediated society in which they live. In this work, he seeks to engage young learners not only in understanding and consuming, but also in creating with data and questioning it. As a part of his research, he designs new computational toolkits that help learners develop data literacies. Additionally, to understand how to best support learning and design for his work, he studies learners as they engage in creative learning activities in a range of contexts and settings. Before coming to SILS, Dasgupta was a Moore/Sloan & WRF Innovation in Data Science postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington. He received his PhD from MIT in 2016, where he was a part of the team that developed the Scratch programming language and online community. Research interests: Human-computer interaction, human-centered data science, learning technologies, digital media and learning.
MARIJEL MELO
Marijel (Maggie) Melo earned her PhD at the University of Arizona, where she was an American Association of University Women Fellow. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in portal: Libraries and the Academy, Hybrid Pedagogy, and Computers and Composition Online. She co-founded the University of Arizona’s first publicly accessible and interdisciplinary makerspace – iSpace – and strategically facilitated its growth from a 400-square-foot room in the Science-Engineering Library to a 5,000-square-foot facility soon to be housed in the University’s Main Library. She also founded the Women Techmakers Tucson Hackathon, the Southwest’s first women’s-only hackathon. She has given keynote addresses and invited-talks at regional and national conferences, including the Google Developer Group’s North American Summit. In October, University of Arizona Libraries presented her with the Top Library Cat Award for her work on the iSpace. Research interests: Innovation, critical maker culture, and the development of equitable and inclusive collaborative learning spaces (e.g. makerspaces) in academic libraries.
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UNC School of Information and Library Science (SILS)
