ABOUT US
The team behind MESA.
Lab Director
Marina Kogan
Lab Director
Marina Kogan is an Assistant Professor at Kahlert School of Computing at University of Utah. She works in the areas of social computing, crisis informatics, and human-centered data science. Her background in Sociology and Computer Science informs her focus on studying online coordination, collective problem-solving, and information flows during disruption events such as disasters arising from natural hazards, epidemics, and political crises. Her most recent work analyzes collective sensemaking, coordination, and information flows in instances of mis/disinformation, conspiracy theories, and state-sponsored information operations.
Graduate Students
Khandaker Abrar Nadib
PhD Student
Abrar (pronounced "aabraar") is a thrid-year PhD student in the Kahlert School of Computing at the University of Utah, co-advised by Marina Kogan and Alexander Lex. His research sits at the intersection of Information Visualization, Human-Computer interaction, and human-centered AI. He examines how visualization design and context shape people’s reasoning about data, and designs and systems that help visualization designers and readers draw evidence-grounded conclusions.
Tasnim Rahman
PhD Student
Third-year PhD student in the Kahlert School of Computing at the University of Utah, working in social computing. Her research examines state-sponsored information operations on social media: how coordinated campaigns adapt their behavior, coordination structure, and narratives over time, and how they shape the information environment by mobilizing media sources of varying credibility.
Thomas Greger
PhD Student
Thomas is a PhD student in the Kahlert School of Computing at the University of Utah, advised by Marina Kogan. His research sits at the intersection of data science and human-computer interaction, with a focus on crisis informatics. He studies how online discourse evolves during prolonged crises and develops methods to detect topic shifts in longitudinal social media data.
Undergraduate Students
Sarah Choe
Description
Short bio description