I am a PhD student at the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University. I did my first year at Penn State University, and then moved to Syracuse with my advisor. I received a BSc in Public Administration from Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, and a Master of Science in Information Systems from the London School of Economics. My master dissertation conducted a structurational analysis of how Course Management Systems are used in practice.
My research interests lie in the interplay between information and communication technology artifacts and organizational elements like structures and processes. In particular, I am interested in inter-organizational arrangements as the empirical contexts of study, since these domains demonstrate more complex interactions between contextual contingencies and ICT. I am currently working with Dr Steve Sawyer on a NSF-funded project which investigates the innovation network that has given rise to the Microsoft Surface.
Research Interests
New ways of organizing made possible by the use of
information
technology. He approaches this issue in several ways: empirical studies
of coordination-intensive processes in human organizations; theoretical
characterizations of coordination problems and alternative methods for
managing them; and design and empirical evaluation of new kinds of
computer systems to support people working together.
He is
currently a PI on two NSF grants. The first is NSF HSD Grant
05-27457, "Investigating the Dynamics of Free/Libre Open
Source Software Development Teams." The second is NSF
IIS
Grant 04-14482- "How can document-genre metadata improve
information-access for large digital collections?" (with Barbara
Kwasnik). Prior to these grants, he was a co-principal investigator on
an NSF grant for "Tools for Inventing Organizations: Toward a Handbook
of Organizational Processes" and for "A Multi-Method Study of the Use
of Information Technology in the Real-Estate Industry".
Teaching Interests
research methods; databases; systems analysis
Professional Interests
Associate editor for the journals Information, Technology
and People and JITTA,
and Webmaster for International Federation of Information Systems
(IFIP) Working Group 8.2 on Information Systems and Organizations.
Personal Interests
reading, travel.