Assistant Professor Jana Diesner has been selected to join the first cohort of senior fellows of the Dori J. Maynard Senior Research Fellows program, a collaboration of The Center for Investigative Reporting and The Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education.
Continuing and deepening the work of both organizations, the program is designed to bring together researchers from diverse backgrounds and disciplines to examine the intersection of race, power and media. Their research will be a resource for media organizations, academic institutions, foundations, and others.
The program is named for Dori J. Maynard, the late president and CEO of the Maynard Institute who worked tirelessly to push the news media to accurately reflect the diversity of the nation.
Diesner joined the GSLIS faculty in 2012 and is a 2015-2016 faculty fellow in the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at Illinois. She earned her PhD from the Computation, Organizations and Society Program at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science.
Diesner’s research in social computing combines theories and methods from natural language processing, social network analysis, and machine learning. In her lab, they develop and advance computational solutions that help people to measure and understand the interplay of information and socio-technical networks. They also bring these solutions into various application context, e.g. in the domain of impact assessment. For more information about Diesner’s work, visit her website.