Ph.D. in Information Studies Student Directory - UCLA School of Education & Information Studies (2024)

arobinsonsweet@ucla.edu

Year Entered Program
2024

Advisor

Michelle Caswell

djbarker@g.ucla.edu | LinkedIn | Website

Year Entered Program
2024

Teaching and Research Interests

• Pedagogy
• Teaching and Learning
• Instructional Design
• Non-Traditional Students
• Community College

Education

• MLIS, UCLA Graduate Certificated, Digital Humanities
• B.A. in Politics, Occidental College

Advisors

Robert D. Montoya

Gregory Leazer

sunjiarui@ucla.edu

Year Entered Program
2024

Student Bio

Jiarui Sun is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA. His research interests include digital recordkeeping & archival informatics, information resource management & digital government, community-based archives, and qualitative research methods & design. Specifically, his current work focuses on the ethical considerations triggered by technology applications in archives.

Teaching and Research Interests

• Digital Recordkeeping and Archival Informatics
• Information Resource Management and Digital Government
• Community-Based Archives
• Qualitative Research Methods and Design

Awards, Honors, and Fellowships

• Oliver Wendell Holmes Award, Society of American Archivists 2021
• Ed&IS Summer Research Funding, School of Education and Information Studies, UCLA 2020
• James V. Mink Scholarship, Society of California Archivists 2020
• Dean’s Scholar, School of Education and Information Studies, UCLA 2019
• Tung-Li & Hui-His Yuan Family Fellowship, School of Education and Information Studies, UCLA 2019

Research Centers

• UCLA Center for Digital Humanities

Advisor

Anne J. Gilliand

kainham@g.ucla.edu | Website

Year Entered Program
2024

Student Bio

As a queer and trans Chinese-Vietnamese son of a refugee from Vietnam and immigrant from Hong Kong, Kai is deeply interested and committed to how our communities can imagine and build new worlds for ourselves. His current research interests include how information infrastructures help build and maintain trans of color care webs, as well as the development of grassroots and community-based interventions and technologies to resist violence and build new futures.

Teaching and Research Interests

• Information Infrastructure
• Care Ethics
• Critical Data Studies
• Trans Studies

Education

• Master of Information and Data Science, University of California, Berkeley
• Bachelor of Arts, University of California, Berkeley

Publications

• Haimson, Oliver L, Kai Nham, Hibby Thach, and Aloe DeGuia. “How Transgender People and Communities Were Involved in Trans Technology Design Processes,” 2023.

Advisor

Safiya U. Noble

CV | Website

Year Entered Program
2024

Student Bio

Bay Area born-and-raised doctoral student in UCLA’s Department of Information Studies focusing on the political economy of libraries, particularly labor and policing. Graduate of UCLA’s MLIS program in 2020, focusing on labor issues in LIS, special collections and archives; co-president of SAA @ UCLA and co-chair of UCLA’s SCA student chapter, 2019-2020. Committed to police- and policing-free libraries and a member of the Abolitionist Library Association. Personal hobbies and interests include crosswords, basketball, surfing, and ceramics.

Teaching and Research Interests

• Labor Issues in Libraries and Archives, Especially Precarious Labor and Organized Labor
• Police, Policing, and Carceral Spaces and Practices in Libraries and Archives
• The Production of Space in Libraries and Archive

Education

• B.A. in Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley (2011)
• MLIS, UCLA, 2020

Publications

• “The Stories We Tell: Precarious Labor and Archival Myths” May 2020 Acid Free’s “Fictions” issue, published by the Los Angeles Archivists Collective. https://www.laacollective.org/work/precarious-labor-archival-myths

Advisor

Sarah Roberts

psantachiara@ucla.edu | LinkedIn | Twitter| Website

Year Entered Program
2024

Student Bio

Pietro Santachiara is the Bernard and Martin Breslauer Fellow and a Ph.D. student in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA. His research deals with knowledge organization and modeling, classification of cultural heritage artifacts, and digital humanities.

Education

• MLIS; University of California, Los Angeles
• M.Sc. in Communication, Technology-Enhanced Communication for Cultural Heritage; University of Lugano (Switzerland)
• B.A. in Communication Studies, Mass-media concentration; University of Modena and Reggio Emilia (Italy)

Publications

• Drucker, J., Polack, P., & Santachiara, P. (2022).Heterochronologies: A Platform for Correlation and Research in Temporal Graphics. Digital Humanities Quarterly, 16(3).

Research Centers

• UCLA Digital Humanities Center

Advisor

Johanna Drucker

tianji008@ucla.edu | CV | LinkedIn

Year Entered Program
2024

Student Bio

Tianji Jiang is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, advised by Professor Sarah T. Roberts. He is also an assistant student researcher at Richard C. Rudolph East Asian Library. Prior to joining UCLA, Tianji obtained a B.M. (2019) in Information Management and Information System and a B.Ec. (2019) in Economics from Peking University.

Teaching and Research Interests

• Knowledge Organization
• Research Data Curation
• Library Management
• User Study
• Social Media Studies

Awards, Honors, and Fellowships

• China’s National Scholarship for Undergraduate Student in the year of 2017-2018

Education

• Bachelor of Management in Information Management and Information System, Department of Information Management, Peking University (2019)
• Bachelor of Economics, The National School of Development, Peking University (2019)

Publications

• Jiang, T., & Li, L. Q. (2021). Image-building of Public Library from Readers’ Perspective A Case Study on the Northern Haidian Library, accepted by and will be presented at iConference 2021.
• Jiang, T., Zhang Y., & Zhou, Q. (2021). A Research on the Improvement Strategy of Big Data Industry Policy made by Local Government in China. Journal of Modern Information 41(2), 132-140, 161.

Advisor

Aimée Dorr