PhD Students on the Job Market

Our doctoral graduates build on a long history of impact and innovation. Each embodies the iSchool’s distinguishing characteristics of interdisciplinarity, the roles of information, and the contributions of technologies.

Patricia Vargas

Patricia Adriana Vargas Leon
Ph.D.

Patricia recently graduated in May 2019 and is currently a fellow at the Information Society Project (ISP) from Yale Law School. She is conducting diverse research projects related to control over the different layers of the Internet infrastructure, which include technical and legal aspects. Patricia’s research areas include Internet governance, cybersecurity, and the law of the sea as a potential framework for the cyberspace. She is particularly interested in issues like the Internet kill switch, network neutrality, and management over the Internet root zone.

Advisor:  Jenny Stromer-Galley

Huichan Xia

Huichuan Xia
Ph.D. Candidate

Personal website: www.huichuanxia.com

I defended my dissertation proposal in November 2018 and am working on my dissertation research. I plan to defend my dissertation and graduate by May 2020. My dissertation investigates various ethical issues associated with academic research in different disciplines based on crowd work. My research areas span across CSCW, HCI, Social Computing, and Intelligence Analysis. I am particularly interested in research topics of privacy, crowd work, collective intelligence, and ethical issues in gig-economy.

Advisor: Jennifer Stromer-Galley

Yaxing Yao

Yaxing Yao
Ph.D. Candidate

I am a fifth year Ph.D. Candidate in the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University. My research lies in the area of human-computer interaction and usable privacy and security. In my dissertation, I am looking at the privacy issues in the smart home environment from a multi-stakeholder perspective, which emphasizes on not only the smart home users but also other stakeholders such as the guests and secondary users, as well as the interaction and social relationship among these stakeholders. The goal is to understand the privacy expectations of different stakeholders and to develop effective privacy notice and choice mechanisms to meet people’s expectations. I plan to defend my dissertation in Spring 2020, and I will be looking for a tenure track faculty position starting in Fall 2020.

Advisor: Bryan Semaan and Yang Wang