Faculty Associates

Richard Beal

Assistant Dean, Educational Outreach and Credit Programs and Adjunct Professor, Department of Environmental and Forest Biology,

State University of New York, College of Environmental Science and Forestry

Dr. Richard Beal has been working in ESF Outreach since 2001 and is currently the Assistant Dean, Educational Outreach and Credit Programs and an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Environmental and Forest Biology.  Rick Teaches The Global Environment (EFB 120) in the fall and spring Semesters and acts as the Primary Mentor for High School Teachers who also teach Global Environment through the ESF in the High School program.  Rick is currently Co-PI on a three-year $1.4 million grant from the NSF that brings college research into Central and Western New York high schools and middle

schools through the ESF Science Corps.  Rick worked two years prior to his appointment in Outreach with Dr. Charlie Hall on projects involving biophysical economics and simulation modeling.  Rick has been active in several outreach projects during his time at ESF.  He participated in committees that developed both the new

Urban Ecology Minor as well as the Urban Ecology course.  He has worked on developing a distance version of EFB 120 (Global Environment) and has taken part in recruitment efforts that focus on urban and minority students. (SUNY-ESF, 2012)

Derrick Cogburn

Director, Center for Research on Collaboratories and Technology Enhanced Learning Communities,

& Associate Professor, Syracuse University's School of Information Studies

Professor Cogburn is an associate professor at the iSchool and an expert on global information and communication technology policy and in the use of ICTs for socio-economic development. His research interests include the institutional mechanisms for global governance of ICTs; transnational

policy-actor networks and epistemic communities, especially for non-governmental organizations and global civil society; and the socio-technical infrastructure for geographically distributed collaboration in knowledge work. He serves as director of the award-winning Center for Research on Collaboratories and Technology Enhanced Learning Communities (Cotelco) that investigates the socio-technical factors influencing geographically distributed collaborative knowledge work, particularly between developed and developing countries. Cotelco is an affiliated center of the Burton Blatt Institute, Centers of Innovation on Disability, where Cogburn serves on the Leadership Council and the Internal Advisory Board.

Sherry R. Crow

Michael D'Eredita

Assistant Professor, Syracuse University's School of Information Studies

"'High performers' both fascinate and influence societies around the world.  These are individuals, teams/groups, or organizations that tend to set themselves apart through the application of specific skills and expertise.  Examples of high performers include a world-champion athlete, an expert 

team of medical personnel, or an organization capable of maintaining the position of market leader.  Their expertise is acquired through experience,

often involving countless hours of deliberate practice and an inherently recursive relationship among individuals, groups, organizations and their respective social networks.  Information Technology (IT) enables individuals with specific skills and expertise to influence more people in a timely

manner than ever before and allows collective expertise to be applied within synchronous or asynchronous distributed environments.  The potential

of IT is realized when its function is aligned with these seemingly natural learning and social processes.   My research is focused on gaining insight into these processes in a manner that can be applied to the development and use of information-based technologies." Michael D'Eredita is currently an Assistant Professor at Syracuse University's School of Information Studies.

Ingrid Erickson

Assistant Professor, Department of Library and Information Science

Rutgers, School of Communication and Information

Ingrid Erickson is an Assistant Professor at the School of Communication & Information at Rutgers University. Her scholarly interests lie at the intersection of information technology and organizational behavior, with a particular emphasis on the emergent communication and work practices surrounding locative technologies (e.g., GPS). Using primarily qualitative, inductive methods, she focuses on understanding the implications of technology on forms

of group and community self-organization, new types of pedagogy and learning, and conceptualizations of public space.

Renee F. Hill

Assistant Professor, Syracuse University's School of Information Studies

As Assistant Professor at the School of Information Studies, Renee F. Hill teaches courses directly related to preparing students to enter the School Library Media profession. Her teaching and research interests are centered in the area of library education. Dr. Hill is committed to conducting research that will increase understanding about issues of diversity within Library and Information Studies. She places particular emphasis on generating

knowledge about information access for members of underrepresented populations (e.g. specific racial/ethnic groups, individuals with disabilities).

Dr. Hill earned a Ph.D. and master's degree in Information Studies at Florida State University's College of Information. She obtained a bachelor's

degree in Exceptional Student Education at Florida Atlantic University.

Nancy McCracken

Research Associate Professor & Professor of Practice, Syracuse University's School of Information Studies

Dr. McCracken is currently a Research Associate Professor who also teaches courses in the iSchool.  Her general research interests are in applying the principles and tools of computational linguistics to making information accessible and understandable for people.  Recent research projects includes a study of the language patterns of using Twitter to engage in politics and an NSF funded project for using natural language processing and machine learning to assist social scientists in content analysis of text.

Lee  McKnight
Associate Professor, Syracuse University's School of Information Studies

Martha Garcia-Murillo

Martha Garcia-Murillo is a Professor of Information Studies at Syracuse University. She has an M.S. in Economics and a Ph.D. in Political Economy and Public Policy from the University of Southern California. She has done consulting for several United Nations Agencies and have provided training for regulators from all over the world through the World Bank and the United States State Department.

William Myhill

Senior Research Director of Legal Research and Writing, Burton Blatt Institute

Adjunct Professor, College of Law Associate, Syracuse University's School of Information Studies

William is co-Principal Investigator (co-PI) of Project ENABLE, Director of Legal Research & Writing at the Burton Blatt Institute and Adjunct Professor

of Law at Syracuse University. In addition to a law degree, Mr. Myhill has a M.Ed. in special education and served for 12 years as a special educator.

His research expertise includes disability law, accessible information technologies, universal design, and making reasonable accommodations. William

will serve on the workshop and materials design and teaching teams, co-teach the workshops, advise on accessibility issues in the project's Web site and wiki

development, assist in development of the participant knowledge assessment, participate in project dissemination and serve on the project's advisory board.

Scott Nicholson
Associate Professor, Syracuse University's School of Information Studies

Dr. Nicholson is a library scientist, which means that he uses systematic research methods to explore facets of librarianship, with the goal of helping librarians better serve their user communities. One of his research areas is the intersection of gaming in libraries. Dr. Nicholson studies the ways in

which libraries use recreational gaming activities and explores what activities are most effective for different user groups and different goals. More

about this project can be found at gamelab.syr.edu. Dr. Nicholson combines his backgrounds as a librarian, computer programmer, a gamer and statistician both in the classroom and in his research role as a library scientist. You can learn more about him by visiting www.scottnicholson.com.

Megan Oakleaf

Assistant Professor, Syracuse University's School of Information Studies

Megan Oakleaf is an Assistant Professor in the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University in Syracuse, NY where she teaches "Reference

and Information Literacy Services" and "Planning, Marketing, and Assessing Library Services."  Her research interests include library value and impact, outcomes assessment, evidence-based decision making, information literacy instruction, information services, and digital librarianship.  She is the

author of the Value of Academic Libraries Comprehensive Report and Review and is on the faculty of the ACRL Immersion Program.

Jian Qin

Associate Professor, Syracuse University's School of Information Studies

Jian Qin researches and teaches in the areas of knowledge organization, information organization, and information technology applications in

managing knowledge and information. She received a grant from IMLS to devleop an eScience librarianship curriculum and from NSF for the

science data literacy project. Her recent research projects include a query log analysis of the Gateway to Educational Materials (GEM), learning object vocabulary, and the Open Knowledge Exchange (OKE) ontology in the workforce domain. She was a visiting scholar at the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), where she developed the learning object vocabulary project. Jian Qin has published widely in national and international research

journals. She was the co-editor for several special journal issues on knowledge discovery in databases and knowledge representation.

Anthony Rotolo

Assistant Professor of Practice, Social Media Strategist, Syracuse University's School of Information Studies

Anthony Rotolo is an Assistant Professor of Practice at the Syracuse University School of Information Studies (iSchool), where he specializes in Social Media and the study of real-time information. His course, "Social Media in the Enterprise" (more popularly known as #RotoloClass on Twitter),

addresses the changing expectations of information users and how businesses and organizations of all sizes can leverage social media to achieve strategic goals. This course at the Syracuse University iSchool leverages real-time social media to deliver a fast-paced, hands on experience and has developed its own online community of learners, practitioners and experts who join the class each week via Twitter. In 2009, Rotolo was appointed Syracuse University's Social Media Strategist, which was the first position of its kind at the university. In this role, he lead a team of staff and students to develop

and implement a strategy that established Syracuse as a leader in the use of social media among its peers in higher education. Less than one year later, Klout, an organization that ranks online influence, rated Syracuse as the second-most influential college in social media, behind first-place Stanford and ahead of third-place Harvard.

Chuck Spuches

Associate Provost, Outreach and Adjunct Associate Professor, Instructional Design, Development, and Evaluation (Syracuse University)

State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry

Chuck Spuches' principal interests include educational program development and evaluation, project management and leadership, and planned change and innovation in education, training, and related context. His current projects include ESF's strategic planning initiative, Daring to Dream; ESF Educational Outreach, including ESF in the High School; an online course on planned change; and related instructional quality and learning technology efforts. His most recent article focuses on process to improve learning: A case study of instructional research and development (Innovative Higher Education, 2000).

Murali Venkatesh

Associate Professor, Director, Community and Information Technology Institute, Syracuse University's School of Information Studies

Murali's expertise is in the areas of management information systems (MIS), group decision support systems, and information networking. His major research interests include group decision-making, visual interfaces for problem analysis, computer-supported cooperative work, and the use of IT in

total quality management (TQM). Murali received his Ph.D. from Indiana University with a dual major in telecommunications and MIS from the

Graduate School of Business Administration.